In 2008, the celebrated photographer Dayanita Singh discovered that using daylight colour film stock at night yielded strange results. When she shot at dusk, the photos came out blue. Feeling experimental one night, she decided to leave her camera on a long exposure. The following morning, she woke to discover that she had been robbed. The thieves had taken her cameras and those rolls of exposed colour film from under her bed – with pictures still waiting to be revealed. “Obviously, the camera saw something it should not have seen,” she says.
The photos Singh made next capture the frightening and uncanny sensations this incident triggered. She set about capturing images like a robber might. She wore a headtorch and captured a parrot by its light. She trained her lens on the decorative fluorescent tubes lighting neighbourhood trees and marvelled at the surveillance-footage green they lent her images. The daylight film made indiscernible night colours lurid: the ground turned red, the trees yellow, the sky a galactic indigo.
