Go Away Closer

Dayanita Singh believes that photography is not about what one sees but how one sees. Describing herself as an artist and bookmaker who works with photography, she conceives and displays her photographs in sequences. Rarely shown in isolation, these photographs are bound in books or contained within bespoke wooden structures that she designs herself. This image is from Singh’s 2007 series Go Away Closer. For Singh, the paradoxical title expresses the condition of photography: in trying to capture and hold onto something – a moment, an event – we only succeed in pushing it further away. An exhibition of Singh’s work was held at the Hayward Gallery in 2013.