The Shiseido Gallery is pleased to announce that from October 22 (Sat) to December 18 (Sun), 2011 it will host the first solo exhibition in Japan by Indian photographer Dayanita Singh.

Dayanita Singh has been active primarily in the West, publishing collections of her work with publishers like Steidl, and exhibiting in prestigious events including solo shows at the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum for the Present in Berlin in 2003, at the Fundación Mapfre in Madrid in 2010, as part of the exhibit Paris - Delhi - Bombay at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2011, and at the Arsenale at the 54th Venice Biennale.

Dayanita Singh was born in New Delhi, India in 1961. From 1980 to 1986 she studied at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, then went to New York to study photojournalism and documentary photography at the International Center of Photography in 1987 and 1988. Later she worked as a photojournalist for a variety of magazines and newspapers.

Singh has become known for her documentary photography, starting with a series on the renowned Indian tabla (a type of drum from northern India) player Zakir Hussain (1986), and later Myself Mona Ahmed (2001), a series on an Indian eunuch (sometimes referred to as India's “third gender.” These she has followed with the works on a variety of themes, including Privacy (2003), a series of portraits of women in Calcutta, and Blue Book (2009), showing industrial sites. Most series she typically accompanies with the publication of photo collection books. Such books she weights equally with exhibition activities and in them she has experimented with a number of different approaches.

For the past two or three years Singh has begun testing a rather adventuresome approach as an ideal way to present her work. Her method involves sorting through the photos she's taken to find her own sense of relationship among them, in the process spinning a new story, using each individual photo as an image in compilations that group them together as a new complete work. Singh also happens to be well versed in literature, and just as a novelist might interpolate her own experiences, memories, and imaginings into her writing, Singh does a similar thing by attempting to use her documentary photos to create a new fiction. She does not wish to push her own story, necessarily, but rather hopes to expand the photos by inviting viewers to apply their own interpretations.

This exhibition will show photos from two series, House of Love and Adventures of a Photographer. House of Love shows Singh's experimental fiction-creating technique in full swing, grouping of photos into several “chapters” that form a larger narrative. In Adventures of a Photographer Singh has taken representative images from her past series to lend a retrospective element, but has recompiled these with the addition of current perspective. Along with the images in the photographs, a “she” emerges as the subject, in the style of fiction, and this is accompanied by a text on the journey of the photographic process written by Singh herself. Some of the important fragments of Singh's career appear here in the form of this fresh new work.

The Shiseido Gallery welcomes one and all to come experience Dayanita Singh's unique method, in which the photographer allows her own photographs to go beyond the confines of documentary photography to create a new story.