"ALL PHOTOGRAPHY IS FICTION"

Dayanita Singh's new photo-novel offers ample proof that pictures often speak louder than words

- Shreevatsa Nevatia

It was Ernst Battenberg, a German publisher, who gifted Dayanita Singh her first camera. Singh used the Pentax ME Super judiciously. In the 1980s, she had little choice: "At NID [Ahmedabad's National Institute of Design], I would make my own contact sheets. Nobody could afford giving them to labs. Also, making prints was an unimaginable luxury." Instead of the usual 36, she would try to eke out 38 frames from a roll of film. Singh was not greedy or parsimonious. The times were frugal.

Homebound during the pandemic, Singh pored over her contact sheets, "the heart of her work". When looking at her photographs from 1981 to 1993 laid out in front of her, she instinctively knew she had a photo-novel on her hands. "But I didn't want the book to have a beautiful image on one page and another beautiful image alongside it," she says, "I wanted the photos to do what text does."

For Milan Kundera, "the novel's spirit is the spirit of continuity-a thing made to last, to connect the past with the future". Of the many novelistic things that Singh's Let's See does, it first meets this Kundera precondition. When, for instance, we see Singh's subjects flipping photo albums, we think of the photographer herself, bent over her contact sheets-but we also see our reading selves mirrored. Rather than dramatic acts, this book is made of these small gestures. And almost all are generous.