Modernism on the Ganges: Raghubir Singh Photographs

Raghubir Singh (1942–1999) was a pioneer of color street photography who worked and published prolifically from the late 1960s until his death in 1999 at age 56. Born into an aristocratic family in Rajasthan, Singh resided in Hong Kong, Paris, London, and New York—but his lifelong subject was his native India. The fall 2017 retrospective at The Met Breuer, Modernism on the Ganges: Raghubir Singh Photographs, will situate Singh’s photographic work at the intersection of Western modernism and traditional South Asian modes of picturing the world. It will feature 85 photographs by Singh in counterpoint with the work of his contemporaries—friends, collaborators, fellow travelers—and with examples of Indian court painting styles that inspired him.

 The exhibition is organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art with the cooperation of Succession Raghubir Singh.

 The exhibition will trace the full trajectory of Singh’s career from his early work as a photojournalist in the late 1960s through his last unpublished projects of the late 1990s. Using a handheld camera and color slide film, he recorded India’s dense milieu in complex frieze-like compositions, teeming with incident, fractured by reflections, and pulsating with opulent color. Singh embraced color as part of a continuous Indian aesthetic tradition that reaches back to the miniature paintings of the Mughal period (1526–1857). He was also deeply influenced by the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson (whom he met in Jaipur in 1966), Bengali filmmaker Satyajit Ray, and American street photographers such as William Gedney and Lee Friedlander. As he traveled along his own artistic path, Singh forged a distinctively Indian style of modernist photography that stands, as he put it, “on the Ganges side of modernism, rather than the Seine or East River side of it.”

Modernism on the Ganges: Raghubir Singh Photographs is curated by Mia Fineman, Associate Curator in the Department of Photographs at The Met.