Dayanita Singh Go Away Closer, Hayward Gallery

This autumn the Hayward Gallery hosts the first UK retrospective of internationally acclaimed photographer Dayanita Singh.  Go Away Closer spans work from her early photojournalistic career on the streets of 1980s New Delhi, right up to a groundbreaking new photo-installation – Museum Bhavan – currently on tour for the first time.

For Singh, the beauty of photography doesn’t lie in individual images but the stories they tell when juxtaposed. Most of the exhibition consists of photographs that have been carefully selected and pulled from the 10 ‘photo-books’ for which Singh is best-known – anthologies of images that visually narrate rural pilgrimages, Indian tours and the life-stories of some of Delhi’s most unusual characters. Look out for the black-and-white studies of her close friend Mona Ahmed (originally published in the 2001 volume Myself Mona Ahmed), a transgender eunuch living in the Indian capital, which tell a particularly compelling story of love, loneliness, family and outsider-dom.

“For me making the photo is maybe 10 percent of my work, or even less,” Singh acknowledges. Storing and arranging her photos are what matters more, and the title of the show refers as much to photography’s intrusive yet detached nature as it does to the opened-up and closed-off structures Singh builds in order to contain her work. Museum Bhavan, the exhibition’s centrepiece, is a series of collapsible photo-walls arranged such that they can be walked through, around and between. Each wall contains drawers of surplus images waiting for their turn to be displayed, and Singh will be swapping and rearranging what’s on display throughout the exhibition as she sees fit.

It’s a process of searching for visual harmonies as well as visual narratives, Singh explained when showing us around the exhibition on Monday. ‘It’s almost like having a tune in my head,” she says of the process. “If I put something in that doesn’t fit, it’ll jar.”

Ticket price: £11