Archiving the Archive: Dayanita Singh’s File Room

A ceiling light placed horizontally at the top of a black-and-white photograph illuminates a section of a government file room in India. The only negative space towards the bottom centre of the image draws attention to the minimally visible floor of the room. These markers—of the ceiling and the floor respectively—highlight the sheer volume of the documents captured in the photograph. Shelves upon shelves are seen barely containing a deluge of papers. Most of these are bound together in files—characteristic of Indian bureaucratic offices—with their metal-ended little threads hanging. One end of the tube light is concealed behind the towering shelf on the left, suggesting that there is a similar corridor stretching left to right underneath. This cover image is from a collection of photographs published in a photobook titled File Room (2013) by renowned photographer and artist, Dayanita Singh.

Described in its abstract as “…an elegy to paper in the age of the digitization of information and knowledge,” the overarching presence of the folders and documents in the composition of these photographs puts forth a special relationship between the photograph and the archive. The images invite the viewer to examine the characteristics of the archive-subject framed in this series. Despite the large number of documents in a visibly poor state, the alphabetical labels on the shelves hint at a degree of order. The file room invokes the register of individual lives contained in its labyrinthine annals that come into sharp relief at critical moments that the government archive seeks to mediate—birth, marriage, relocation, death, etc.

Sets of documents are seen piled up on office tables, seemingly awaiting the archivist and their turn to be classified into relevant shelves—perhaps the ones depicted in these photographs or those hinted at in the extending, never-ending corridors. The archive is a place of conservation of the past but in these photographs, it equally comes across as a site of decay, encompassing within themselves histories contesting the rot of time. Singh's photographs capture the tension between the archive’s aspiration to catalogue its contents in an absolute manner and the files themselves, brimming and overflowing in the spaces of the file room, bringing chaos and resisting order.

Singh treats the file room as an independent subject with the archivist often absent from the images of the collection. Just as philosopher Roland Barthes decrees the photograph to be “a thing in itself,” that is a thing that self reflexively hails its own materiality, here the archive in its material form is established as “a thing in itself.” When Singh’s camera enters the file room and photographs it as such, it encodes the archive in terms of its physicality—as parchments, papers, shelves and crowded rooms and as a taxonomical and visibly time-consuming process.

An evocative engagement with the materiality of a mundane object like the bureaucratic file, this collection invites the viewer to think beyond the content of the archive. It brings to focus the material conditions under which the archive is produced, preserved and accessed. In the form of a photobook, it conjoins and extends the argument of a declining world of paper to the physicality of the photographs and books themselves.

All images from File Room by Dayanita Singh. Germany: Steidl, 2013.