Photobook Library

File Room is Dayanita Singh’s elegy to paper in the age of digitization. Documenting the labyrinthine working bureaucratic archives across India, her images examine how memory is made and history is narrated through these monuments of knowledge. Amidst the chaos of crumbling shelves and windowless subterranean interiors, Singh finds a surreal beauty and a “Ganges side of modernism,” highlighting the human element—the unsung archivists—who maintain these complex organizational systems against the rot of time.