The Chairs exhibition at the Gardner Museum in Boston represents Dayanita Singh’s journey over several years and continents. In 2002, while in residence at the museum, Singh began photographing objects in the galleries freely, following the light as it moved across each singular space. She found that she was mainly drawn to furnishings and furniture—chairs, in particular. She photographed their essence as though they were people. She called it “conversing with chairs”, which to her meant conversing with the unseen and untold generations who had interacted with these objects in one way or another. Unlike commissioned photographs, these pictures had an edge to them, an inherent sense of risk that is implicit at the beginning of a new unfolding story. So, as Singh moved from room to room, her chair portraits adventure in Boston began.
Late in the evenings, in the quiet of the museum’s carriage house, Singh made her first fold-out artist’s book for a writer friend she had recently travelled with. This first accordion book was made with tiny photos cut from the medium-format contact sheets that she had brought from India. She pasted them in a small Moleskine Japanese album that she had bought in an art supply store near the museum.
Just before leaving Boston, Singh started making a second accordion book. A year later she gifted this to me, the museum’s contemporary art curator. This second accordion book was a souvenir of the time we had spent together in the museum and Singh’s acknowledgement of our friendship and of a very creative and fruitful visit. “I hardly wanted to leave the Museum, and it turned into a very inward experience for me. I came to the residency because I was obsessed with photographing house museums in India and yet once I stayed, I started to photograph flowers and my own reflection in Bellini’s Christ…I started to explore more and more the journal style…I found another language, of being a mobile photographer and book maker, traveling, photographing, printing and making little books on my journeys.”
Singh proceeded over the years to make more fold-out books, each created for a specific person: a private exhibition for an audience of one. I was gifted a second volume from Singh’s time in Rome and Spoleto while she was searching for a Renaissance chair to photograph. Fausto Calderai, a furniture historian whom Singh visited in Florence during that same trip, also became a recipient of a book. His accordion book was full of photographs of the chairs from his Florentine apartment. His chairs were piled high with books and, for Singh, photographing one of Calderai’s chairs was like photographing a family portrait. So too Andrea Anastasio, a designer who had shared beautiful moments with Singh in Coimbatore, India was gifted a book. Both Calderai and Anastasio became collaborators on the Chairs exhibition and their two books eventually found their way into vitrines in the Long Gallery of the Gardner Museum during the run of the exhibition.
As Singh was working out her ideas for the exhibition and its sequencing, she made a fold-out book from contact sheets as before. It was an intimate, magical, almost devotional book. In it she united chairs from house museums in India with chairs from the Gropius House in Concord, Massachusetts with chairs from her Florentine explorations and finally to a single Gardner chair from the Titian room.
At one point she even considered placing this fold-out book in the exhibition as a single work of art. Instead it became the prototype for the first Singh artist book printed by Gerhard Steidl. In lieu of an exhibition catalogue she chose this intimate fold-out format, and also devised an original mode of distribution. In keeping with the original concept of gift-giving for one person, Steidl printed one thousand books: five hundred for sale at the museum and five hundred to be privately distributed by fifty friends.
I still keep my two fold-out books safely in my bookcase at home and on occasion unfold them on a bookshelf and extend them into an exhibition of memories for one. Sometimes I take them on my travels and open them in a new location, where occasionally I share the viewing with good friends. The ten Chairs books Singh gave me to distribute were all gifted to artists and curators over a period of ten years. It was a thoughtful and singular gift for individuals, who have a keen interest in artist books and were sure to be appreciative and treasure them.