Photo essays on India

As the sole representative of New York-based photo agency, Contact Press Images, in India, Devika Daulat-Singh has supplied rare images of Aishwarya Rai to Spanish magazine Maxim and taken on assignments on business barons like Kumarmangalam Birla for Forbes. She has also done special features on Delhi's Metro project for Internationazionale.

As a photo editor, she'd rather, she says, sell a new image of India. "The idea is to look beyond a single image. I'm not the one to project an exotic India, but am more interested in the urban phenomenon like how businesses are proliferating and outsourcing is a big issue," she says.

Currently, Daulat-Singh who owns Photoink, the two-year-old photography agency and design studio, is busy preparing for a new exhibition. Next month, she is organising a photo exhibition of Anay Mann's works, titled "Generation in Transition" at the Habitat Centre's Visual Art Gallery. Mann is among the six photographers, Daulat-Singh represents and promotes.

In January 2002, she edited Anita Khemka's work for an exhibition in Barcelona on HIV communities in India.

Among the other photographers she syndicates are fashion photographer Farrokh Chothia and Dileep Prakash who has been shooting vintage steam locomotives. She will soon organise an exhibition of the human figure by the New-York based photographer Giorgia Fiorio in future.

Singh, who sells pictures for anywhere between $100 to $1500 to foreign magazines like Stern, Geo, Biba, Editions and Solar, says business is "comfortable" and that she mainly responds to demands. Her USP, she says, is to provide pictures outside the ambit of wire agencies and give something beyond war and current news.

There have been unusual requests ranging from pictures of the Metropolitan Mall in Gurgaon to Buddhist nuns of Arunachal. Another magazine asked for a picture on Indian jails. "Even the inhuman conditions in Indian jails had to be shown in an Indian context. And that's where my role as an editor comes in," says Singh.

Apart from syndicating pictures, the ultimate aim, she says, is to take up book projects in the future. "Although the design studio is independent of our agency, I'm keen on doing more book projects,"says the photographer who studied photography at the Rhode Island School of Design.

Last year, she edited a book on video art, published by the Apeejay Media Gallery. On the cards are several new projects: a book on Buddhist nuns of Arunachal by Arun Nangla and a book by art curator Alka Pande.