Indian Photographer Wins the Hasselblad Award

On October 14, the Hasselblad Foundation named Indian photographer Dayanita Singh as the 2022 Hasselblad Award winner. As the first winner from South Asia, she will receive a cash prize of SEK 2 million (USD 177,000), a gold medal, and a diploma. An exhibition of Singh’s signature works is currently on view at the Hasselblad Center in Gothenburg until January 22, 2023.

Singh is known for using the photo-book format to create “book objects”—works that are concurrently books, art objects, exhibitions, and catalogs—and to explore the poetic and narrative possibility of sequencing. Born in New Delhi in 1961, Singh studied visual communication in Ahmedabad and later, photojournalism and documentary photography in New York. After working as a photographer for the New York Times and The Times, Singh experimented with alternative forms of producing, publishing, and viewing photographs. Her early publication Sent a letter (2008) comprises seven accordion-fold books in a handmade cloth box, with each book unfolding as an exhibition. Singh also invented “mobile museums” that transcend the limitations of the two-dimensional medium. Her book Museum Bhavan (2017), for example, features black-and-white photographs in movable wooden structures as open archives that preserve the memory of forgotten places and people. The images can be constantly rearranged and recombined, and the museums can be transformed into different shapes, spaces, and connections, animating the viewers’ engagement with the photographs. Throughout her career, Singh has won six international awards, published over 20 books, and exhibited internationally in more than 160 solo and group shows.

Stefan Jensen and Louise Wolthers, curators of the exhibition, said, “Dayanita Singh generously opens up for intimate, affective and physical encounters with photography. Through photography she records and shapes the stories told within the structure of the archive before turning it into a new form.”

Founded in 1980 and named after Swedish camera developer and manufacturer Victor Hasselblad, the Hasselblad Award is a photography award that acknowledges the achievement of a photographer every year.  

Catherine Li is ArtAsiaPacific’s editorial intern.