Raghubir Singh

From Jaipur to Calcutta — The Beginnings of a Photojournalist

Raghubir Singh was born in 1942 into a former Rajput aristocratic family in Jaipur, Rajasthan. Amid the social changes that followed Indian independence, he moved away from the family business and went to Calcutta to find work in photography. Western photography magazines he had read since childhood helped draw him toward the profession. By the late 1960s, he was contributing pictures to international magazines.^{*12 His upbringing within a courtly milieu is relevant when considering his position behind the camera in Employees, Morvi Palace (1982), a photograph of women polishing a palace floor.}

Photographing Court Paintings — Learning to Compose Across Multiple Centers

Singh met Henri Cartier-Bresson in Jaipur in 1966 and developed an interest in the fleeting arrangement of people within a frame. Around the same period, art historian Stuart Cary Welch commissioned him to photograph paintings from royal collections. The repeated work of observing and reproducing their details deepened Singh’s engagement with Rajput court painting.^{*13 He had to fit figures and architectural details already arranged on a painted surface into his camera’s frame.*16 In his later street photographs, the stationary paintings gave way to people and vehicles in motion, demanding choices about composition at the instant of exposure.}

Court paintings often distribute figures and events across a surface, inviting the eye to move between center and periphery. Singh carried that compositional approach into street photographs where moving people, vehicles, and reflections occupy several parts of the frame. He also drew on the work of William Gedney and Lee Friedlander, photographers he came to know in the 1970s.^{*1 Friedlander’s use of reflections and the arrangement of figures in Rajput painting provide two ways into Singh’s Zaveri Bazaar and Jeweller’s Showroom (1989).}

Monsoon Rains — Color, Weather, and Human Movement

Monsoon Rains, Monghyr, Bihar (1967) shows women caught in the rain beside the Ganges. Wet clothes and rain-soaked ground determine the color of the scene.^{*4 In a 1994 interview, Singh described this early image as lyrical and simply composed, observing that his later work moved toward more elaborate images.*3 Seen beside Zaveri Bazaar (1989), the photograph marks a shift from figures gathered within one rainy scene to several scenes joined through reflection. In Chess Players, Monsoon Floods, Benares (1967), two people continue a chess game in a flooded town.*9 Their stillness over the board shares the frame with moving water, in contrast to the women’s movements in the other monsoon photograph. A 1999 review also singled out the humor of a game continuing amid the flood.*14 The Smithsonian print was made in 1989 from the 1967 negative, leaving a further interval between exposure and finished object.*20}

Zaveri Bazaar — Mirrors and Layered Street Scenes

By the late 1980s, Singh was bringing events taking place in several parts of the frame into a single exposure. In Zaveri Bazaar and Jeweller’s Showroom (1989), mirrors and windows divide views of a shop’s interior and the street outside. The viewer’s eye travels from merchandise close to the lens toward buildings and passersby beyond.^{*7 In Dhabawallah, Bombay (1992), the delivery worker’s route intersects with the lines of buildings and roads.*5 The crossing of moving bodies and fixed structures gives a single image several paths of movement and overlapping moments.}

Friedlander had also used shop windows and reflections to interweave spaces inside and outside the frame. Singh turned to reflection to bring simultaneous activities of trade and movement into his street pictures. In a 1994 interview, he spoke of the colors he found in rivers and women’s clothing as reasons for photographing in color.^{*3 Mirrors divide the shop from the street in Zaveri Bazaar; the delivery worker moves against the geometry of the city in Dhabawallah. Color helps distinguish objects, surfaces, and people held together in these crowded compositions.}

Subhas Chandra Bose Statue — A Monument Amid Everyday Life

Subhas Chandra Bose Statue, Calcutta (1986) brings together a monument to a leader of the independence movement and people going about their lives in the city. The statue commemorates a political past while pedestrians and vehicles occupy the Calcutta of 1986.^{*6 Which passersby enter the frame, and where they appear in relation to the monument, reflects the photographer’s choices in describing a city. Sital Mata Goddess and Worshipper (1989) similarly records the distance between a religious image and the person offering devotion.*10 By showing both the object of worship and the worshipper, it allows the image and the action of prayer to be viewed together.}

Ganga and Rajasthan — Organizing Books Around Rivers and Regions

Beginning with Ganga: Sacred River of India (1974), Singh published Rajasthan (1981), Kashmir (1983), and Kerala (1986), organizing photographs around particular regions. Journeys along the river and reporting trips within individual states furnished different structures for pictures of village and urban life and religious ceremonies. The 1974 book follows the Ganges; the 1981 volume gathers a state. Their different geographical boundaries are themselves choices about how photographs can form a book.^*3

Ganga uses the river basin as its organizing principle, whereas Rajasthan brings together landscapes and people across a state. In River of Colour (1998), Singh reedited photographs made over approximately thirty years into a book spanning many parts of India. His 1994 interview connects repeated journeys through the regions with the work of making photobooks.^{*3 A review of River of Colour drew attention to the ordinary activities he depicted, from people playing chess during floods to the traffic of the cities.*14 The 1967 chess players and the 1989 jewelry bazaar belong to different places and decades; their separation can be read within the book’s broader play of color and recurring subjects.}

From River of Colour to A Way Into India

River of Colour: The India of Raghubir Singh (1998) is a retrospective selection from three decades of photography. It brings riverside scenes, religious ceremonies, and urban traffic into a collection that crosses regional and chronological boundaries.^{*14 Singh’s phrase “modernism on the Ganges” expressed his insistence that modern photography could also be understood through India’s visual culture.*1}

Published posthumously in 2002, A Way Into India makes the car window and body central to the act of looking. Window frames and city outlines occupy the same pictures, locating the photographer inside the vehicle as he observes life on the street. The recurring form of the car connects scenes from different towns, while the height of the window and the distance to the road condition what the camera can see. People outside are viewed from a different position and elevation than the person inside. The Ambassador car that appears in the series was a widely used Indian model that entered production in 1957. Exhibition materials from the Smithsonian draw attention to how its curved body, windows, and mirrors provide both frames and measures of the surroundings.^{*18 The photographer’s seat in the car establishes a social as well as a physical distance from those walking in the street.*19}

A Young Assistant — Reflections of a Workplace Hierarchy

In A Young Assistant of a Betel Leaf Seller, Benares, a boy looks back at the camera while a mirror behind him catches the reflection of his employer outside the immediate field of view.^{*8 The reflection gives the picture depth and discloses something of the workplace in which the boy stands. A 2018 review in Frieze examined the mirrored figure as a clue to differences in social standing.*11 The boy facing the camera and the employer visible farther back create, within one photograph, a workplace hierarchy that a frontal portrait alone would leave unseen.}

Modernism on the Ganges — Court Painting and the View From Privilege

The phrase “modernism on the Ganges” proposes a history of modern photography understood through Indian paintings and cities as well as through Paris and New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2017 exhibition placed 85 photographs by Singh alongside court paintings and contemporary Western photography, allowing viewers to compare those pictorial traditions directly.^{*1 The accompanying catalog included contributions by Mia Fineman, Amit Chaudhuri, Shanay Jhaveri, and Partha Mitter.*15 The arrangement offered a way to examine shared approaches to placing figures at several points in a picture and organizing broad areas of color.}

When vivid color becomes shorthand for “Indianness,” the differences in class and living circumstances that shape the photographs risk slipping from view. In a 2018 essay for The Caravan, Ratik Asokan examined Singh’s account of a drought-stricken village in Rajasthan (1981). Asokan focused on the gap between the hardship caused by drought and Singh’s praise for the bright clothes and apparent vitality of the people he described.^{*12 The criticism addresses what a photographer chooses to make central, and what remains in the background, even when he is aware of deprivation.}

Employees, Morvi Palace, Gujarat (1982), discussed in the same criticism, depicts two women polishing a palace floor amid elaborate interior decoration. The patterns of their clothing echo the surrounding floor and furnishings, but their work remains identifiable.^{*17 The stronger the formal correspondence, the easier it becomes to see the women as part of the decorative scheme. That effect can also divert attention from the labor of cleaning. Given Singh’s aristocratic background, the image raises a specific question about his gaze on palace employees. The compositional unity of decoration and workers is inseparable from the question of how the picture describes class.}

The New Color Photography — An Indian Pictorial Lineage

Accounts of color photography becoming an accepted artistic medium in the West regularly emphasize William Eggleston and Stephen Shore. Eggleston photographed the colors of domestic interiors and everyday objects in the American South; Singh turned to monsoon flooding in 1967 and a Bombay jewelry bazaar in 1989. His interest in the multiple centers of Indian court painting also shaped the work.^{*2 Singh’s own background in a former aristocratic family, his study of court painting, and his international magazine assignments complicate any straightforward comparison with New Color photography.}

The Met’s 2017 exhibition used 85 photographs, court paintings, and Western pictures to examine Singh’s compositional lineage. A 2018 critique asked how that same compositional method conveyed divisions of class.^{*12 In Employees, Morvi Palace, the photographed relationship between a patterned floor and the women cleaning it becomes the point at issue. The tension is also present in Singh’s words in Rajasthan (1981), where he acknowledges a village’s suffering during drought yet celebrates its brightly dressed residents.*12 How did the compositional lessons of royal painting shape his view of people cleaning a palace? That question brings the achievements of his pictures into focus alongside their limitations.}