ABSTRACT
For Dayanita Singh, photography no longer exists. For her, 'there is only the frame'. Singh uses her extant photographs to create combinatory sculptures that she calls museums, displays of multiple photographs in frames that are part bookcase and part shadow box. She has focused on creating books of photographs rather than photographic works that might mimic paintings, and she has consequently become obsessed with the concept of visual libraries, a sort of garden of forking paths for the prosthetic gaze. In the book Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes argues that photography aspires to be a language but cannot be language. In the book Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes argues that photography aspires to be a language but cannot be language. The theory Barthes develops in Camera Lucida about the pensive image, the photograph that makes us think, resonates with his earlier work S/Z.
