Selected by Dayanita Singh
Mayank Austen Soofi has created a new form on Instagram under the handle thedelhiwalla, combining photography and literature. He uses literature to transform the image and equally use the image to nudge you towards another reading of the literature. On top of this, Soofi has really found a way of connecting an audience to parts of Delhi that aren’t invisible, but perhaps ignored. He’s out every night, taking photos and documenting everyday life. In the morning you’ll find stories on your Instagram feed, which is a combination of the photograph and a caption that might be directly related to the image, or it might include a quote from writers like Marcel Proust, Arundhati Roy or Jane Austen. Sometimes the caption will be on a completely different tangent to what’s being pictured, which adds depth to how we understand the falseness of the image. This way of finding a form on Instagram, his own kind of language for the image-based app, is very exciting to me.
At a certain point the genre of documentary photography went from capturing rural scenes to cities, to being about the ‘friend circle’, and then eventually the home – its remit seemed to shrink. But here is someone who is documenting and creating an archive of the city, and Soofi also understands that in order to do that, one has to go out every day and do the work and be committed to the subject over a long period of time, days, weeks, months, years, even decades. Soofi documents everything: from someone who might be selling bangles or teddy bears, to a street recycler, to someone who’s at a funeral ground. He’s been documenting Delhi on Instagram for about four years now (his blog has been running much longer), creating this living archive of the city – particularly Old Delhi, which is a world apart from posh South Delhi. The result is that he is introducing the people on the street to a new audience – one that’s not limited to the artworld, but which is interested in Delhi as a place with many different communities. He pictures people who are overlooked, who are considered part of the lower-class, but day-after-day he tells their stories through image and text with dignity (where he can, he seems to try to include their names – whether they’re a chai seller or a tuktuk driver). He’s a medium between these different worlds.
Mayank Austen Soofi is a writer, photojournalist and regular contributor to the Hindustan Times as well as the author of the book Nobody Can Love You More (2012) and the blog and books The Delhi Walla. An exhibition of Soofi’s work, Somewhere in Delhi, with designer Anna Gerotto, was on show at various venues in Venice in 2016.
Dayanita Singh is a photographic artist who lives and works in Delhi. A recent solo exhibition, Sea of Files, was shown at the Hasselblad Center, Gothenburg, in 2022.
