Shanay Jhaveri: I am very glad to be able to carry on a conversation we began seven years ago about the Zakir Hussain book. I want to take us back to 1986 and the actual or the original Zakir Hussain book or as you have now taken to calling it, ‘the student edition’. Can you tell us a little bit about the assignment at the National Institute of Design that led you to make this book?
Dayanita Singh: I had been photographing Zakir for many winters and I was fascinated with these new worlds that photography could lead me into. I think Vikas Satwalekar was the only faculty member who supported my obsession with photography, because at that time NID taught only product photography. So when Vikas was doing the Book Design course with our batch, I must have suggested that I would like to use the Zakir pictures and Vikas being Vikas must have said ‘go for it!’ That’s when I made this maquette, without thinking that it would ever get published.
SJ: The original Zakir Hussain book was a slim volume, about 80 pages, which didn’t meet with much success?
DS: Not at all! It did not even sell on the footpath (as my colleagues loved to tell me) and I went through about twenty years without mentioning the Zakir book. It would not be on my CV and I also didn’t want to be known as the Zakir Hussain photographer. So when Sumantra Ghosal was making a film on Zakir, I refused to be a part of it. I said that I want to do more in life and not just be known as the Zakir Hussain photographer, apart from the fact that the book had failed so miserably. One of the great people in photography at that time said to me ‘you cannot become a photographer by just taking photos of the same person.’ Now I want to say, ‘sir!, guess what? It’s because I kept taking pictures of the same person, that I am where I am today.’
SJ: I remember that when I saw the book for the first time, which was in 2013 at the Hayward exhibition. I was astounded because, as you said, you never liked to mention the book in public and I was so curious to see that you had made such a public gesture, to mind what amounted to reconciliation with something from your past that you had disavowed. The book is unique because it barely pictures Zakir on stage performing but rather focuses on what one colloquially might call the ‘behind the scenes’ - sessions of riyaaz (practice) or the intense recording sessions or just him thinking and contemplating and quite crucially, spending time with his family. There is a startling intimacy to the pictures. The book telegraphs clearly an interest in an individual, family life, community, all of which you will continue to explore in your future books. Also, the way you organise the book, it is almost unassumingly a template for many of the concerns that have shaped your practice.
DS: That I must confess, publicly, I didn’t see the Zakir book, the way you saw it and you made me look at it afresh. For that I am so grateful to you and to Stephanie Rosenthal, the curator of the Hayward because she said, ‘how can we have a career retrospective without the Zakir book and there is nothing to be ashamed of.’ I really was very embarrassed by this haphazard grid and that it felt more like a scrapbook.
Not at all like the photobooks I had been seeing. So Stephanie urged me to, in the very nice way that curators do, bring the book out there, the place where it had to be because I wouldn’t be a photogra- pher if it weren’t for Zakir Hussain. If the organiser hadn’t pushed me at the concert and if I hadn’t stood up and said in 1981 “Mr. Hussain I am a young student today but someday I will be a very important photographer and then we will see” and then burst into tears. It was most humiliating; imagine falling on your backside in front of hundreds of people. So for me the idea of becoming a photographer did not emerge from the love of photography per se, but the different worlds I could become a part of through it. It was amazing then to put this work together and to have Vikas’ unconditional support. Then there were decades of neglecting/hiding it till Stephanie pushed me to put it on those walls of the Hayward gallery. But also, when you spoke to me about it, I remember you came to the studio, and that’s when we looked at the maquette together. That was also because my mother is the ultimate archivist and she had preserved all my papers and I was able to show the original to you. So a series of chance coincidences.
SJ: So now that you have reconciled with the book, why did you choose to print the maquette and not the original version?
DS: I just showed Gerhard some images of the maquette, thinking he would appreciate its maquetteness- he said ‘I want to publish it, as it is’. It is a tribute to analogue book making. So I thought ‘well then, it will be quite a traditional book, for once, that I don’t even need to be there for the making of this book, I could just hand this package to Gerhard Steidl. It would be the facsimile of the maquette and Shanay’s essay, at the end’. But when Gerhard saw it physically, he was so excited and he said that we should publish it just as a maquette and it should feel like a maquette. A work in progress, casual etc. I told him that he doesn’t understand that we need a hard- bound book for India, for the humidity, for Zakir’s students who live in Bombay but he didn’t agree with me. He insisted that we make a facsimile and a separate reader. That would have your text as well as an interview he would do with me. So he made himself a part of the project, which is very unusual for Gerhard but exactly like you said, he liked the analogue quality of the work and that it would remind people how books were made/ should be made. To the reader, he added some pages from my process diary. While he was suggesting all this I asked him if I could also have a poster that becomes a book. So he said ‘what are you talking about now!’ and I told him, ‘let me show you’ and that’s how we made this poster that folds into the book with the idea that this could be the book.
Now usually how it works with Gerhard is that I make a fresh demand he says, ‘NO, absolutely NO’ and then the next morning he says, ‘okay, why not’. So, what he decided was that there will be this sleeve and out of the sleeve will fall the maquette, the reader and the poster. I said that ‘this might be fine for your air-conditioned environment but the maquette and the sleeve will begin to fray in India.’ He said that ‘the work should have the spirit and feel of a maquette, that the person who receives it should not feel like this is a fine art book’. So the only time we really argued was about the red slipcase. I argued that students of Zakir would want to keep this book on their tables or like frames on the wall, but Gerhard said that ‘I absolutely disagree with you’. He said that I was contradicting myself and that we made something that is ephemeral. He said that ‘people will put this in the sleeve, the poster will fall out and go to somebody else, the reader will go somewhere else’ and all these things I loved but I also knew that some people would need to somehow keep/enshrine that image of Zakir. So we made these red cases in Delhi, which have become a little tight but once you take the poster out, there they stand and they are just meant for the sleeve. This has been a very interesting process and he is still annoyed with me but he did say ‘Do what you like with your copies’, which is his way of saying ‘don’t’. And then what he has done is that he has put this text without asking me, this is his agenda. It says ‘The process of taking a pair of scissors in your hand, cutting up prints or print outs of the photos, all spread like a landscape on the table in front of you and pasting them carefully into a notebook, this is what I call book building, not book making. I am trying to propose that book building is a way of dealing with photography regardless of whether you end up making a book or not’. So this is Gerhard, the red one is me, and you can decide which version you prefer.
SJ: When you study the original maquette, it is clear you disregard the grid as a struc- turing device; instead you are very free with your images. This is underscored by the fact that you designed every page indi- vidually. I think that by designing each page individually, you were questioning ‘how can all these images exist within the single format of a eighty page book?’ There wasn’t a pattern that you followed, and for me that felt very instructive in trying to understand how this book has led to some of the later books, your particular kind of restlessness to always evolve and develop a new form. It is this inquiry into finding a new form for your images, tocontinually evolve the format of the photo book that takes you to the accordion and your book objects and finally photo archi- tectures. To able to draw this line from the Zakir Hussain book to your latest work, to recognise the persistence to challenge and demand more from form and formats is so inherent and core to your sensibility as an artist. This has always been your endeavour, regarding how the photographic image has been considered and you always wanted to find different ways to position it and engage with it. And I think that the maquette is generous in offering the readers and younger generations of photographers a way in, laying bare your thought process while making this book, when you were just a twenty three year old student yourself; all those unfinished thoughts in the maquette, like the notes to yourself, which you never finished, you were pretty harsh with yourself. So as you were putting together this facsimile, what memories did it bring? You still work in a similar manner.
DS: Yes, I still cut and paste. I invite a few people to my house in Goa every year and we sit and we just cut photographs and we paste them on pages and we change it, build a new sequence and we start again. I think it’s the only way to work with images so the end product emerges from the work itself and not some predetermined format. But revisiting the material alongside the book was quite a revelation because those notes contained my future in them. I was already thinking of building a photo archi- tecture, about mailing books in envelopes, etc. etc. I had wanted the book to be the exhibition. You know, I did not make any prints, apart from what I needed for the dummy. There was no concept of making an exhibition of the work. I wanted that the work could not exist in any other form, other than the book. So for example, if The Metropolitan Museum of Art said that they wanted my Zakir work, even to the MET I would have to say, buy it in the form of forty four books, because the work doesn’t exist in any other form. So those of you from the art world would appreciate or not appreciate what I am trying to do here. At the same time when I made this book into its exhibition (you know when you’re looking at the book and it’s generally resting in your lap, it’s a very private experience) and placed it on the walls, I made myself so vulnerable. I just read an interview Zakir did for India Today and he talks about this very exhibition and how some of the photographs reminded him of when his father was chastising him. There were about three pages that I didn’t include in the published book because they felt they were crossing a line, you know there’s the suitcase and the belt on the bed and maybe you can’t tell but I know there’s an argument going on there and I self-censored and took it out of the book but when we looked at it together, Zakir remembered that day so clearly. I was crying at the talk and his eyes were quite moist too. He spoke about how what he saw in me, made him think of what he made of himself, just having that drive, not even knowing where it will lead. And why he gave me all this access (and the access he gave me was not just of himself but that whole world of musicians) you know what a privilege, what a privileged life in the company of such maestros. What a way to start a working life. Like I was saying it’s my first book but it’s also my latest book, a cycle has completed itself. Almost thirty five years later.
SJ: Or it’s ongoing and enduring. There’s something else I want to ask you about. You’ve mentioned it a couple of times. There is another part to the story, which is while spending those six winters with Zakir, you became sensitised to the improvisatory nature of Indian classical music and incredible discipline and rigour of riyaaz. Maybe you could talk just a little bit about impact these observations had on your own work? How that has led to your distinctive, elliptical quality of organising images across your various bodies of work?
DS: What I learned most of all from Zakir was rigour. The rigour and riyaaz of practice as well as of thought and that constantly challenging oneself. Zakir was/ is a very tough mentor, even though he comes across as a very sweet person. I remember there was a time when Hariji offered to teach me the flute, Hariprasad Chaurasia and I was beside myself. Can you imagine, having a guru like Hariji teach you the flute and Zakir said, ‘are you willing to give this eighteen hours a day for the rest of your life?’ He said ‘just don’t do it’. You take one thing, you stay with it, you master it and then you challenge it. So when he was at the Venice Biennale in 2011, he was on some jury for the film festival, he sent me a message saying ‘so proud to see your work at the Venice Biennale’ but this time I felt like he’s not the only star in the picture so I responded saying ‘see I’m also a big star now’ and he said ‘sweetheart I hope you never start to believe that because the day you do is the day its over’. To have a presence like that in your life, no matter what is happening, is immeasurable. He’s happy that I’ve made the book, but he also says ‘what next, how are you going to push this, how will you do more?’ A voice like that around you saying what next, what more, is invaluable. His voice never lets me get comfortable with anything I may have done. I also see this in his work, with his music, it’s never good enough, there’s always ever more to do. That whole idea of restraint along with riyaaz, I really learnt restraint from Zakir, where to stop. That is also the key to editing because he always leaves the audience yearning for just a little more. The whole idea of a classical music composition, the raag, having fixed notes but then you do this huge innovation within those notes is something that I often use as a yardstick to edit. I remember at that time of making the book at NID, I was trying to bear in mind that can I have a very slow alaap of images in the opening of my book.
SJ: There is immediacy to photography, and if you’re working as a photographer in a certain manner there are formal and aesthetic expectations of your images, notions of which have changed and evolved over time.
DS: But not so much, that is what annoys me about photography, it’s still very much about the image, in the art world.
SJ: To go back to what we were discussing about the process of looking at those musicians, you make it manifest in these pages quite literally with the overall rhythm or the flow of the book. I also want to dwell on a little bit more on what you said that you didn’t come to photography as a photographer but you came into it through going to NID and probe a bit further the cross disciplinary aspect of that educational programme and how that has shaped your aesthetic sensibility but also endowed your practical knowledge and skills that allows you to make mobile museums, for example your sense of design by that I mean product design, how to finish something. I want to hear a little bit more about that kind of training that you’re bringing to create this plethora of object forms you have engineered for your images, book objects to photo architectures. That’s not how most people, who make images, come to make their images.
DS: If I had gone to photography school or art school I wouldn’t be making all of this. It’s like having the Zakir Hussain Academy on one side and the National Institute of Design on the other side. At NID, I don’t know whether it’s still there now, there was a very strong foundation course that was really about thinking out of the box and problem solving all the time and somehow that has really stayed with me as well as the skills where in the foundation course you had to do ceramic design, product design, textile and lots more. So then when I made Sent a Letter (2007) and I’ve also used a particular fabric, the markeen fabric that is used for posting packages, I know how the textile is going to work, how to finish it, I know how to construct a box, how to work on the mobile museum, what joinery I needed, these were all things I took for granted and I had quite an exceptional training in both NID and the music world.
SJ: I also discern a distinct modernist sensibility that you bring to your design components
DS: That, I think, has a lot to do with NID, the actual architecture of NID, the proportion of those corridors I think they’re a part of all the museums I make. It’s also about growing up in a house where Joseph Stein was a big influence, he was a very close friend of the family, so the India International Centre and that kind of furniture, that is the kind of aesthetic that I inherited from my family. How the structures work, how they pack, how they open, all that definitely comes from NID, I think NID trained me to pick up on these challenges and run with them.
SJ: Recently, Nancy Adajania included the ‘Zakir Hussain Maquette’ in an exhibition at the Serendipity Art Festival, which grappled and charted an alternative Indian art history, one that focused on experimentations of form and media formats. Is that exciting for you? To see that the book lives outside the domain of fine art photography, which is something that you’ve been very vocal about throughout your career.
DS: Yes, that’s the great advantage of the book. I don’t want to be the book on your bookshelf, I don’t want to be the print on your wall, I want to be this object that can change, transform, something you can add to because all that is very much a part of photography. A photograph is really just the raw material, it’s like putting all the vegetables on the table and saying ‘here’s a great meal’ but that doesn’t make one a chef. It’s about form and the material must find its own form. I can’t say that I want to make a mobile museum, I have to sit with some of those thirty five hundred images and I have no idea what form the images will take and that too, again I think, comes from NID; that trust in the process. That has been the key for me. To use the photographs as a starting point, I can’t take an image and say that’s it and that’s the work. So the book especially now that I’ve been able to find a way to exhibit it. Does precisely what I had always hoped for.
SJ: Now we have a fourth kind of certain typology.
DS: I am thinking for my forthcoming retrospective in Berlin, of having an offset room. I mentioned this to Gerhard and he said ‘since you call yourself an offset artist doesn’t mean anything in digital prints, we will print your entire retrospective in offset’ because he feels that offset too is going to die down. It will turn to digital printing and that offset with his kind of expertise won’t last beyond him. He’s exceptional because he’s actually a printer himself, he even knows how to clean the machine, let alone mix the inks. He has his secret recipes for those Steidl blacks.
SJ: It is this hands on approach that I suppose got him so excited about Zakir Hussain project. I want to hear you talk a little bit about the actual process of printing this maquette. What paper was used and what were some of the decisions that you both made?
DS: I think Gerhard got carried away with the analogousness of this work, so he really wanted to enhance it. I don’t know enough about scanning but Steidl can scan like no one else. In Go Way Closer for example, you can see that the book has more details than my prints but he actually scanned from my prints. He scanned the Zakir maquette in so much detail that now you see even more than in my original facsimile . He’s exaggerated and I was not so happy with that but it was too late since I wasn’t there for the final printing.
SJ: The reader that accompanies the maquette is structured in a way, as an offering to future generations, to designers to say that this is how books were once made and here you have visual evidence of the process and someone who is very diligent about their process and literally has the facsimile. I think that it’s very heart- ening to see someone like him, who has been making books for decades, to feel so invested in a project and to insert him- self so willingly into its production and conception.
DS: Yes, I think that’s absolutely the reason and he wanted the maquette to be its separate thing and not to be a hardbound traditional book. For the reader, he could have published my entire process diary, he just wanted enough to tease people. He wanted to forefront process. I had an email from Gerhard on the first of January this year, in which he said ‘thank you for bringing this project to me’ and I thought ‘gosh that is something very new’.
SJ: So do you think you’ll reprint the actual Zakir Hussain book next?
DS: Steidl always asks ‘shall we reprint, or make a new book?’. I always want to move on and so does he. So, let’s say those that have the student edition from 1986 have it and for the rest, let’s leave it to chance.
It’s an unusual book that reveals the warp and the weft of its own making. That is a simultaneous study of a person and of the book itself. That takes us behind the scenes of the making of a legendary musician – Zakir Hussain, as well as the making of the book on him, and eventually, the bookmaker – Dayanita Singh.
‘Zakir Hussain Maquette’, Dayanita Singh’s student project at NID published by Steidl in 2019, is a photo book (which includes a reader and an animated poster) that gives plentifully. Dayanita is that rare artist who invests an extraordinary amount of time guiding young artists, laying bare the processes of her practice; and here’s the book thatexemplifies the single-minded attention – the riyaaz and rigour – that she upholds as sacred to her practice; any practice. It is illuminating to read handwritten accounts by the tabla maestro in tandem with the young designer’s acutely self reflexive, sometimes admonishing notes on her own design process. It’s a book of thoughts on learning by complete submission to your craft.
Text Rukminee Guha Thakurta
Date 17-07-2021
This conversation was initially published in our November Bookazine and is a part of our extended archive.