Dayanita Singh: File Room - Hardcover

About the Book

Dayanita Singh's photos of archives and their custodians across India examine how memory is made and how history is narrated. These images bring to light the paradox of archives: they are impersonal in their classifications, yet each is the careful handiwork of an individual archivist, an unsung keeper of history whose decisions generate the sources of much of our knowledge. Archives are vessels of orthodox fact but can also be the home of neglected details and forgotten documents than can unfix the status quo. As the pace of change in contemporary India accelerates and Indians turn from the past and fix their gaze on the future, what will become of the archive? Singh prompts us to imagine archives as not merely documents of dusty scholarship but as monuments of knowledge, beautiful in their unkempt order.

Book Synopsis

A new edition of Singh's acclaimed first foray into documenting the secret lives of archives

This is the long-awaited new edition of Dayanita Singh's (born 1961) File Room, her first book on archives, published by Steidl in 2013. Singh's images of archives and their custodians across India examine how memory is made and how history is narrated. Her photographs bring to light the paradoxes of archives: while impersonal in their classifications, each is the careful handwork of an individual archivist, an unsung keeper of history whose decisions generate the sources of much of our knowledge. Archives are vessels of orthodox facts but also the home of neglected details and forgotten documents that can unsettle the status quo. As the pace of contemporary India accelerates, what will become of the archive? Singh prompts us to imagine archives not merely as documents of dusty scholarship but as monuments of knowledge, beautiful in their unkempt order.