| Raghubir Singh | |
|---|---|
| Born | October 22, 1942 Jaipur, India |
| Died | April 18, 1999 (aged 56) New York, USA |
| Nationality | Indian |
| Occupation | photographer |
| Years active | 1965- 1999 |
| Notable works | Ganga: Sacred River of India (1974) River of Colour: The India of Raghubir Singh (1998) |
| Style | documentary, street |
| Influenced by | Henri Cartier-Bresson |
| Website | |
| Official website | |
Raghubir Singh (1942–1999) was an Indian photographer, most known for his landscapes and documentary-style photographs of the people of India.[1] He was a self-taught photographer who worked in India and lived in Paris, London and New York and during his career worked with National Geographic, The New York Times, The New Yorker and Time. In the early 1970s, he was one of the first photographers to reinvent the use of color at a time when color photography was still a marginal art form.[2][3]
Singh belongs to a tradition of small-format street photography, pioneered by photographers like Henri Cartier-Bresson, whom he met in 1966 and observed for a week while the latter was working in Jaipur,[4] and who, with Robert Frank, was to have a lasting impact of his work; however unlike them he chose to work in color, as for him this represented the intrinsic value of Indian aesthetics.[5] In time Singh was acknowledged with William Eggleston, Stephen Shore and Joel Sternfeld as one of the finest photographers of his generation and a leading pioneer of colour photography.[3][6][7] He travelled across India with the American photographer Lee Friedlander who according to him ‘was often looking for the abject as subject’; in the end Singh found Friedlander’s approach of ‘beauty as seen in abjection’ fundamentally western, which suited neither him nor India, thus he created his own style and aesthetic imprint, which according to his 2004 retrospective created "a documentary-style vision was neither sugarcoated, nor abject, nor controllingly omniscient".[8][9] Deeply influenced as he was by modernism, he liberally took inspiration from Rajasthani miniatures as well as Mughal paintings, and Bengal, a place where he felt the fusion of western modernist ideas and vernacular Indian art took place for the first time, evident in practitioners of the Bengal school, and also the humanism of the filmmaker Satyajit Ray, who later became a close friend. "Beauty, nature, humanism and spirituality were the cornerstones of Indian culture" for him and also became the bedrock for his work.[10]
Singh published 14 well-received books on the Ganges, Calcutta, Benares, his native Rajasthan, Grand Trunk Road, and the Hindustan Ambassador car,[7] and today his work is part of the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, amongst others.[11]
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Raghubir Singh was born in 1942 in Jaipur, into an aristocratic Rajput family. His grandfather was commander-in-chief of the Jaipur Armed Forces, his father a Thakur or feudal landowner of Khetri (now in Jhunjhunu district, Rajasthan), but after independence his family saw a dwindling of their fortunes.[12] As a schoolboy, he discovered Beautiful Jaipur, Cartier-Bresson's little-known book published in 1949, which inspired his interest in photography.[13]
After his schooling at St. Xavier's School, Jaipur, he joined the Hindu College (Delhi), but dropped out in his first year,[12] and it was here that he took seriously to photography.[2][3]
Singh first shifted base to Calcutta to make a career in the tea industry, as had his elder brother before him. This turned out to be unsuccessful, but by this time, he had started to take photographs.[2]
Moving to Calcutta proved to be a turning point in his future career, as he spent the following months photographing street scenes of Calcutta. More importantly, he met the historian R. P. Gupta, who later wrote for his first book Ganges (1974), and he was gradually introduced to a circle of city artists who deeply influenced his later work — especially the realism of filmmaker Satyajit Ray, who initially found his photographs with "No guts". Young Raghubir took this as a challenge and pursued photography more vigorously. In the coming years, he did impress Ray, and they became friends: Ray designed the cover of his first book, and years later wrote the introduction of his Rajasthan book.[14] This also set a precedent for literary input in his future books, as in the coming years the writer V. S. Naipaul conducted a dialogue with him for the preface to his book on Bombay (1994), while R. K. Narayan wrote the introduction to Tamil Nadu (1997).[10][12]
By the mid-1960s Singh had his first break, when Life published eight pages of his photographs about student unrest. He later moved to Hong Kong after being given several assignments from leading international magazines in his mid-twenties, as he started doing photo features for National Geographic, The New York Times and some British publications.[2][12] In 1968, he visited Jaisalmer, and watched while Ray filmed Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne; he shared with Ray a vision for a new way of seeing ordinary Indian subjects, evident in his work.[15]
After a decade of travelling along the Ganges, Singh published his first book, Ganges in 1974, with an introduction by Eric Newby. The book had an immediate impact and quickly ran to several editions.[12]
Though his early work was inspired by Henri Cartier-Bresson's documentary-style photographs of India, he chose colour as his medium, responding to the vivid colours of India, and over time adapted western techniques to Indian aesthetics. His uniquely inside view of India made his images stand out amongst those by other world photographers who had shot in India.[16]
In the 1970s, Singh moved to Paris and during three decades of rigorous training and exposure he carved his own niche in international photography with a series of portfolios of colour photography on India. As he later acknowledge, his style was deeply influenced by Mughal painting and Rajasthani miniature paintings, where too within the overall framework, individual sections display autonomy.[17]
In his early work Singh focused on the geographic and social anatomy of cities and regions of India. His work on Bombay in the early 1990s marks a turning point in his stylistic development; at the contact of the metropolis his visual language acquires a new complexity. In addition to his photographic work, Singh taught in New York at the School of Visual Arts, Columbia University and Cooper Union.[12] In 1998 the Art Institute of Chicago organized a retrospective exhibition of his work which was still on show at the time of his death. The book River of Colour was published on the occasion of this exhibition.[11]
Singh published over 14 books. In the last of these, A Way into India (2002), published posthumously, the Ambassador car in which he travelled in all his journeys across Indian since 1957 becomes a camera obscura. Singh uses its doors and windshield to frame and divide his photographs. In the accompanying text, John Baldessari compares Singh to Orson Welles for his juxtaposition of near and far and to Mondrian for his fragmentation of space.[11][18] In recent years a dialogue has been established between his work and that of contemporary artists.
In February 1999, what had been intended as a retrospective of his work at mid-career opened at the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, after showing at the Bon Marché in Paris and the Art Institute of Chicago.[13]
Raghubir Singh died on 18 April 1999 of a heart attack.[19] Upon his death, the art critic Max Kozloff wrote, "If you can imagine what a Rajput miniaturist could have learnt from Henri Cartier-Bresson, you'll have a glimmer of Raghubir Singh's aesthetic."[20]
He was awarded the Padma Shri, by Government of India in 1983.[21] He was also awarded the Maharaja Sawai Ram Singh Award (posthumously) on 27 October 2001. Apart from First Fellowship in Photography of the National Museum of Photography, Bradford (1986-7) and Mother Jones Lifetime Achievement Award (1999).
In 1972, he married Anne de Henning, also a photographer, and couple had a daughter, Devika Singh.