Sea of Files

On Singh’s inventive explorations of archives―with an essay by Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk. This book celebrates Dayanita Singh (born 1961) as the 2022 winner of the Hasselblad Award, considered the most prestigious international photography prize. Sea of Files highlights Singh’s consistent and unique engagement with the archive, both literally and metaphorically.

The book includes Singh’s associative visual essay Sea of Files in its entirety, as well as―for the first time in a publication―Museum of Innocence (The Madras Chapter) and other series engaging with the meanings and materiality of archives.

A personal essay by Orhan Pamuk explores Singh’s photographs of state archives, for him images of aura and melancholy that evoke the “texture of memory,” “an idea of poetic decrepitude and a sense of profundity.” The book furthermore shows how Singh has paved new ways for engaging with photography, be it through humanist portraiture or her innovative display structures and book objects that recast conventions of the museum and publishing.