Go Away Closer

When photographer Dayanita Singh goes to India, she takes pictures like any tourist. When she gets home, she creates a small photo journal for each trip, always with someone in mind, whether a traveling companion or a friend she'd been thinking of along the way. Each visit is distilled into an accordion fold of no more than 28 pages, produced in an edition of two; one to remain with her (she calls this her kitchen museum), and the other a gift for the friend to whom it is dedicated. The five examples gathered here, two of which were recently on show at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, are a miniature library of exhibitions in a box. Singh was born in 1961 in New Delhi. She studied documentary photography at the International Center of Photography in New York and has had several solo shows. However, her passion is making books--among them, Privacy (2003) and Chairs (2005).