Raghubir Singh

Raghubir Singh (1942–1999) was an Indian photographer, most known for his landscapes and documentary-style photographs of the people of India. He was a self-taught photographer who worked in India and lived in Paris, London and New York. During his career he worked with National Geographic Magazine, 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.

Singh belonged to a tradition of small-format street photography, working in color, that to him, represented the intrinsic value of Indian aesthetics. According to his 2004 retrospective his "documentary-style vision was neither sugarcoated, nor abject, nor controllingly omniscient". Deeply influenced by modernism, he liberally took inspiration from Rajasthani miniatures, Mughal paintings and Bengal, a place where he thought western modernist ideas and vernacular Indian art were fused for the first time, as reflected in the works of the Bengal school and the humanism of filmmaker Satyajit Ray. "Beauty, nature, humanism and spirituality were the cornerstones of Indian culture" for him and became the bedrock for his work.

Singh published 14 well-received books on the Ganges, Calcutta, Benares, his native Rajasthan, Grand Trunk Road, and the Hindustan Ambassador car. Today, his work is part of the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, amongst others. As a schoolboy, he discovered Beautiful Jaipur, Cartier-Bresson's little-known book published in 1948, which inspired his interest in photography. 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 Bombay (1994), while R. K. Narayan wrote the introduction to Tamil Nadu (1997).

By the mid-1960s, Life Magazine had published eight pages of his photographs about student unrest. He later moved to Hong Kong and started doing photo features for National Geographic Magazine, The New York Times...

In the 1970s, Singh moved to Paris and over the following three decades, through rigorous training and exposure, he created a series of portfolios of colour photography on India. His style was influenced by Mughal painting and Rajasthani miniature paintings, whose individual sections maintain their autonomy within the overall frame.

Teacher In addition to his photographic work, Singh taught in New York at the School of Visual Arts, Columbia University and Cooper Union. 1986–1987: First Fellowship in Photography of the National Museum of Photography, Bradford 1999: Mother Jones Lifetime Achievement Award 2001: Maharaja Sawai Ram Singh Award (posthumously)

Personal life In 1972, he married Anne de Henning, also a photographer, and the couple had a daughter, Devika Singh, who is curator at the Tate Modern and holds a position at Cambridge University.

Singh died on 18 April 1999 of a heart attack. Upon his death, the art critic Max Kozloff wrote, "If you can imagine what a Rajput miniaturist could have learned from Henri Cartier-Bresson, you'll have a glimmer of Raghubir Singh's aesthetic."

Rape Allegations On 3 December 2017, artist Jaishri Abichandani organized a protest outside the Met Breuer, where Singh's "Modernism on the Ganges" opened as an exhibit on 11 October 2017. Abichandani alleges that Singh sexually assaulted her in the mid-1990s while on a trip to India where she accompanied him as an assistant. She claims to have been under the impression that the trip was a professional one, and that she made her non-consent known.

Publications Ganga: Sacred River of India (1974), Perennial, Bombay Calcutta (1975), (preface by Joseph Lelyveld), Perennial, Bombay Rajasthan (1981), (preface by Satyajit Ray) Thames and Hudson, London and New York; Chêne, Paris; Perennial, Bombay. . Kumbh Mela (1981), Arthaud, Paris; Perennia, Bombay Kashmir: Garden of the Himalayas (1983), Thames and Hudson, London and New York; Perennia, Bombay Kerala: The Spice Coast of India (1986), Thames and Hudson, London and New York; Chêne, Paris. . Banaras: The Sacred City of India (1987), Thames and Hudson, London and New York Chêne, Paris Calcutta: the home and the street (1988), Thames and Hudson, London and New York; Chêne, Paris. . The Ganges (1992), Thames and Hudson, London and New York; Aperture, New York (Japanese, German and Italian editions). Bombay: Gateway to India (1994), (conversation with V.S. Naipaul), Aperture, New York; Perennia, Bombay. . The Grand Trunk Road (1995), Aperture, New York; Perennia, Bombay Tamil Nadu (1997), (preface by R.K. Narayan), DAP, New York. River of Colour: The India of Raghubir Singh (1998, 2000, 2006), Phaido, London (2000 French and German editions). . A Way into India (2002), Phaido, London. .

Exhibitions In 1998, the Art Institute of Chicago organized a retrospective exhibition of his work, which was still on display at the time of his death. The book River of Colour was published on the occasion of this exhibition.

Solo exhibitions 1983 Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown 1983 Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego 1984 Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design 1984 Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge 1984 Duke University, Durham 1985 University of California Museum, Berkeley 1985 Pace McGill Gallery, New York 1987 Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol 1987 National Museum of Photography, Bradford 1989 Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC 2017 The Met Breuer, New York (Modernism on the Ganges: Raghubir Singh Photographs)

Public collections Tate Modern, London Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia Art Institute of Chicago Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Museum of Modern Art, Oxford Centro per l'arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown National Media Museum, Bradford Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)