Nony Singh
India
Nony Singh was born in 1936 in Lahore and made her first photograph at the age of seven. During the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, her family fled to Patiala. She continued her education in Dehradun and Delhi, graduating from Miranda House. Singh's career began at the World Agricultural Exhibition in Delhi in 1960. Today, Singh lives in New Delhi, surrounded by her vast archives of photographs and albums, and is working on her next book.
The Archivist
The first, and perhaps most beautiful, photograph made by Nony Singh was of her mother. She took it on her father's camera in 1943, during a family picnic near Rawalpindi, now in Pakistan.
Nony Singh started to photograph from the age of eight after she was given a box-camera by her father. Many years later, when she married Kanwar Mahenderpal Singh, his father gifted Nony his Zeiss Ikon camera. Then, in 1980, as the mother of four daughters, Nony thought she was taking her last photograph when her first-born, Dayanita, was about to leave home for higher studies. This book, then, is a record of that double act of stopping time and letting it go, of acknowledging the inevitability of loss or change as well as the fragile heroism, beauty and humour of challenging the inevitable with stillness and arrest. She remained the auteur of her work, and therefore of the life and subjectivity she captured in it, also by continually arranging these images into stories of her own through different kinds of sequencing.
- Aveek Sen from The Archivist
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