House of Love is a work of photographic fiction that takes the form of nine short stories. Working closely with writer Aveek Sen, whose prose follows a journey of its own, Singh explores the relationship between photography, memory, and writing. House of Love, designed to blur the lines between an art book of photographic images and a work of literary fiction, is a book whose images demand to be read, not just seen, and whose texts create their own sensory worlds. The combination creates a new vocabulary for the visual book.
The House of Love itself is the Taj Mahal, but the Taj Mahal as a recurring motif that stands for a range of meanings – meanings made up of the truths and lies of night and day, love and illusion, attachment and detachment. This hardbound volume has 106 color and black-and-white illustrations in its 172 pages. It measures 15.875 x 24.765 cm.
Publishing is also a significant part of the Dayanita Singh’s practice: in her books she experiments with alternate forms of producing and viewing photographs. Here, Singh’s latest is the “book-object,” a work that is concurrently a book, an art object, an exhibition and a catalog. Learn more about Singh and her artistic practice on her website.
Sourced / excerpted from this artist’s website. (2022)
by Dayanita Singh
Radius Books, Santa Fe
and Peabody Museum Press, Harvard, 2011
ISBN: 978 1 934435 27 4
20 November
