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Background information
"This book, 'Sea of Files', celebrates Indian photographer Dayanita SINGH as the 2022 winner of the Hasselblad Award, considered the most prestigious international photography prize. It highlights her consistent and unique engagement with the archive, both in a real sense (including the overflowing bundles of India's public and private archives) and metaphorically: the archive as a vessel of cultural experience. The book furthermore shows how she has paved new ways for engaging with photography, be it through humanist portraiture, or her innovative display structures and book objects which recast traditional notions of the museum and publishing.
Content
The book 'Sea of Files' includes the associative visual essay 'Sea of Files' by Dayanita SINGH 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 Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk explores the lyrical, silent reality of her 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,"' as well as 'dignified resistance even when the passage of time makes everything meaningless.'" (© Steidl Verlag, 2022)