D.S.: This is a difficult issue. My best work, as you know, has been documentation-oriented. Some work has been for magazines and some for myself. Only if works have a lingering quality to them can they become art, in my opinion. There should be a kind of timelessness, a kind of intensity to the works that touches you. So, not all documentation can become art. By itself, it is not very hard to make images. You could do that with your mobile phone, for example. The thought that goes into a work or a suite of works, from conceiving a theme, following it, sifting through it, weeding out instantly gratifying images from more long-lasting ones - all these activities determine the quality of your work. How sharp your awareness of your medium is - its histories and practices - is also very crucial.

You illustrate your own ideas through your works and sometimes your works frame ideas you did not quite know were there. There is always a choice however - I make portraits, but at the same time, also do a series on beds. A photographer has the choice to create works that are socially relevant or personally relevant or both.

A.S.: All kinds of spaces abound in your works. How do you choose those that you want to photograph? And how do they choose you?

D.S.: There is something about empty spaces that attracts me. I like going to people's homes, capturing them between conversations, understanding how figures behave in situations. Spaces with people and without people, people's responses to historical spaces, spaces from the past - all of them carry a magical charge.

A.S.: Photography enables a public framing of private moments. Many of the images in your Privacy (2003) series seem to suggest this. The photographer chooses moments from a subject's life and the subject projects a way of being in front of the photographer. Is there any way in which the photographer allows the viewer to see some of the masks slipping?

D.S.: A portrait is nothing more than what has passed between the sitter and the photographer at a given moment. I think all the people I photograph are collaborators in the creation of this fantasy of a family. This fantasy fascinates me, not the truth, what ever it may be. I am also interested, as you can see, in Go Away Closer (2007), with the lives of objects and places and how they suggest what they suggest. You were talking about Amitav Ghosh's family portrait that appeared in the Times of India the other day - that, for me, is a successful family portrait. Amitav's presence does not overwhelm and all his family members come across as relaxed. Interestingly, it's one of the few portraits I have of a man. Somehow, by the final edit, the men disappear.