Exhibition of Raghubir Singh's works: Committed to colour

An exhibition of Raghubir Singh's works celebrates the photographer's depiction of India

A striking work by Raghubir Singh from 1982, titled Employees, depicts two women, dressed in vibrant traditional attire, cleaning the rooms of the Morvi Palace in Gujarat. The stillness of the women is almost akin to that of the furniture that surrounds them and their gaze is almost defiant as they look straight at the viewer.

“This exchange of gazes recurs in so many of Singh’s images — for instance, the Dabbawallah (Mumbai, 1992),” says Amrita Jhaveri who, along with her sister Priya, showcased Singh’s work in the 2015-show, Conversations in Colour, at JhaverI Contemporary, Mumbai. And now one can see 85 of Singh’s photographic works, including Employees, as part of the fall 2017 retrospective, Modernism on the Ganges: Raghubir Singh Photographs, at The Met Breuer.

Curated by Mia Fineman, associate curator, department of photographs at The Met, the exhibition presents a trajectory of Singh’s career, from his early works as a photojournalist in the late 1960s to his last unpublished projects of the late 1990s. This show comes nearly 20 years after Singh’s works were last shown in the US in 1998. “He was one of the pioneers of colour street photography in the 1960s and ‘70s, along with American photographers such as William Gedney and Lee Friedlander.”

Singh’s unique artistic vision presented an amalgamation of Western modernism and traditional Indian aesthetic of picturing the world. The Indian miniature painting held a deep fascination for Singh and was a subject of close study. “Occasionally, Singh would quote directly from well-known miniatures. A photograph of the master craftsman, Ghulam Hussain Meer, from Singh’s 1980-Kashmir series is a homage to the famed portrait of the ‘Dying Inayat Khan’, attributed to Balchand,” says Jhaveri.

Singh was also adept at transforming the mundane into something magical. Stillness and movement worked in tandem in his images. In one photograph, a boy stands at the bus stop while the world around him seems to be in a tizzy, with buses waiting to be filled by impatient passengers. “Singh’s use of glass and mirror, traditional props of a magician, are another way in which he creates magic in his images. This is particularly visible in his photographs of Bombay (now Mumbai) as well as in classic images such as the Pavement Mirror Shop (Calcutta, 1991),” says Jhaveri.

At The Met Breuer, Singh’s works are presented alongside those of his contemporaries. He was deeply influenced by Henri Cartier-Bresson, whom he met in Jaipur in 1966, and also by filmmaker Satyajit Ray. “We are showing Indian court paintings that he was interested in as well as work by Gedney and Friedlander, who he was very close to,” says Fineman. “He travelled a lot through India along with Friedlander, but while the latter chose to shoot in black-and-white, Singh realised that to showcase the essence of India, images needed to be in colour.”

His chosen medium was the 35-mm Kodachrome, neither sold not processed in the India of the 1960s-70s. “He broke with the colonial tradition of picturesque landscapes and monochrome images of alienated subjects, favoured by peers such as Robert Frank and Diane Arbus,” says Jhaveri. He once told Time that to see India monochromatically was to miss it altogether. “His pioneering commitment to colour,” says Jhaveri, “has since defined his work.”

Modernism on the Ganges: Raghubir Singh Photographs can be seen at The Met Breuer between October 11, 2017 and January 2, 2018