Evocations of an Exchange: Review of Portrait of a House: Conversations with BV Doshi
Devoting an entire highlight on her Instagram profile to the provocation, “Why photograph?” photographer and “offset artist” Dayanita Singh prods at the fixities we tend to accord notions of the archive and the logic of image-making. Through the immensities offered up by this phrase-question, Singh extends her ponderings on the perils of language that affect and stimulate her own practice; in doing so, she urges her reader-listener-viewer to pause with the idea of an image to consider the infinitudes residing within it. Singh’s most recent work, Portrait of a House: Conversations with BV Doshi was published in August 2021 by Spontaneous Books, and in its simple, conversational texture it both unveils and maps a deeply philosophical undertaking. Responding to the inimitable BV Doshi, his home and his interiorities; Singh opens up ruminations on light, space and photography—inviting the renowned architect to reflect, in his own poetic manner, upon the primary commonality that they share: a love for the art of making.
Presenting an idea of architecture that is dialogous and freeing, Doshi speaks of the staircase as anticipating connection between the levels in a space. In these photographs, Singh images different staircases across Doshi’s houses, framing the ascensions and forms it centralises.
A slim publication of 152 pages, Portrait of a House begins with a two-part foreword that excerpts conversations between Doshi and Singh, the first having taken place at Kamala House in Ahmedabad in 2018 and the second, a public talk at Gallery White in Vadodara in 2019. The foreword contextualises the making of this book, which Singh traces back to when Architectural Digest requested her to photograph BV Doshi in 2018. Agreeing to do so for a chance to meet the Pritzker Prize winning architect, Singh travelled to Doshi's Kamala House in Ahmedabad, and followed this up with subsequent visits to Maneesha House and Tejal House in Vadodara and Ahmedabad respectively. Unforeseen, as most of the final forms of her work are, the idea for the book gradually took shape as Singh gathered her photographs of Doshi during the nationwide lockdown in 2020. Choosing to continue their conversations over Zoom, Singh presented the black-and-white portraits she had taken of Doshi and his family across his houses in Gujarat, and the discussions that followed are imagined in a question-answer format across the volume. The text interspersed across the book—including musings by Singh’s mother in the afterword—supplements the essence of the photographs as excerpts deliberating the warm, interpretive relationship between the architect and the photographer.
In her photographs of the family, Singh is particularly sensitive to the kinds of intimacies that are synonymous with familiality. On the left, she photographs Doshi’s three daughters and his granddaughter (seated on the back of the sofa). On the right, a photographed detail of Tejal’s (daughter), Jessica’s (granddaughter) and Doshi’s hands.
To listen to—or read—BV Doshi on architecture is to realise how intrinsically educational his manner of articulation is. Speaking of how design must retain a malleability, Doshi prioritises the potency of a pause and the effect it has in planning a space. Good architecture, he says, lets a person unfold across the composition of a space, birthing stories, dialogues and cementing lifelong associations. It is transformative, and is continuously in transformation, because it becomes an extension of the people that inhabit it. On his process of building his houses, he reflects on how he compulsorily created spaces without limits, edges and ends; allowing only fluidity to remain as infinite and immeasurable. In one such exchange, Singh responds by saying that in her photographs of his family what is visibilised is the portrait of a home—a “temple of light”—lived in and loved in. Doshi’s own readings of Singh’s photographs are flawlessly poetic. He notes how in each photograph in the book, there is a glow of light, conveying the tenderness of a life layered into the space of a home, imbricated and absorbed. He observes with great enthusiasm the richness Singh manages to capture, returning continually to what he identifies as the language of light in each frame.
Left: A photograph of Doshi and his wife of sixty-five years, Kamala, standing by a door.
Right: Kamala sings a bhajan as Doshi stands near a window, watching her in the middle of her recitation.
In architecture as well as in photography, light is primordial. Bringing entities into existence, light implies discovery—it produces linkages between things being brought together in a space. Portrait of House frames the fluidity of a home—its diffusions and dimensions of shared space and of conviviality. Paralleling Doshi’s words, Singh’s photographs frame with great nuance the gestural qualities of the spaces he designed, as well as of the people in them. Interested in how architecture lives and how it is lived in, her trained eyes follow the peacefulness of intertwining hands, the leisure of bodies horizontal across “wild gardens,” the luxury of slumber, as well as the softness of family and repose. Singh’s perspective on book-building is uniquely specific, much like the books she makes. Likening her process to building a house of cards, she writes of the instability that belies the image in the photobook. To build a book, Singh observes on her Instagram stories, you need courage to let go and to confront the possibility of starting all over again, right up until the moment that the book is finally realised in physical form. Similarly, Portrait of a House presents a willfully effusive tapestry of light and filiality, stitching together Doshi and Singh’s cumulative years of experience in their respective fields, summarised succinctly in their cogent exchanges.
Left: The cover of Portrait of a House: Conversations with BV Doshi. Spontaneous Books, 2021.
Right: Across all his constructions, Doshi prioritises the subtleties of light and shadow. In this photograph, Doshi opens a window to demonstrate its fluidity.
To read more about Dayanita Singh, please click here.
All images from Portrait of a House: Conversations with BV Doshi by Dayanita Singh. 2021. Images courtesy of the artist and Spontaneous Books.
