The photographer on her new book of conversations and images that offer an intimate portrait of the BV Doshi's home
On assignment in 2018, photographer Dayanita Singh met architect BV Doshi for the first time. An architect and a photographer have common ground — both shape light and space — and meeting as they were at Doshi’s personal residence in Ahmedabad, their conversations turned to thoughts on home and family. The assignment was soon complete, but the conversations between Singh, 60, and Doshi, 94, continued.
It has resulted in Portrait of a House: Conversations with BV Doshi (Rs 2,200), a book of conversations and monochrome photographs published by Singh, who is known for making book-objects and “museums” in book form. Portrait of a House offers an intimate portrait of a man and his family at home, even if the man is a Pritzker Prize-winning architect and the home is his design, named Kamala House after his wife. Pages of family members at ease and in each other’s company at Kamala House fill these pages, which conclude with a conversation between Doshi and Singh’s mother, Nony.
You say in the book that there is a shift in body language that you have encountered only in Doshi’s houses. What was it about Kamala House that made this possible?
When I started working with the Hasselblad (camera, in 1997), my work became a lot more formal. My very early work used to be like these images from Mr Doshi’s house — a lot more open and vulnerable, a certain tenderness and certain tenuousness, it’s more a mood rather than a photograph. That was a quality that I thought had gone from my work and I was surprised to find it again in Mr Doshi’s house even though I was still using a square format.
It has to do with the ease that the body feels when you enter the space, which is a combination of the light and the wood and the way you have to turn to enter it. Somehow you get embraced by the space and you have immediately relaxed.
You are sitting on the ground and sometimes on the bed — there are no hierarchies for the guest. Because there’s such little furniture in his house, you have to find your own position. Someone will sit on top of the landing with their guitar, someone will be sitting on the steps and eating their food, which may not happen in other houses, because a step is a step and a landing is a landing.
It also reminded me of possibly childhood, family, home — in ways that I am not really used to anymore. This didn’t happen when I went to photograph his buildings. Those are good strong buildings in my traditional sense.
You have been drawn to the chair as both subject and symbol. Here, does the staircase play that role? The photograph of one of Doshi’s daughters, Tejal, having a meal on the stairs is beautiful.
I didn’t realise that I had photographed so many staircases. I didn’t do it consciously. In fact, I have made a work, a large structure called Doshi Stairs, which shows 20 staircases. It will be shown at my retrospective next year. I had long conversations with him about stairs but didn’t put them all into this book because I like the domestic (aspect) of this book and I like how it suddenly moved into my mother’s house.
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