Raghubir Singh

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.

Raghubir Singh studied at St. Xavier's School, Jaipur. The recorded working language is English. The field of work recorded is photography. Employment is recorded with Columbia University and School of Visual Arts. Work by Raghubir Singh is recorded in the collections of Minneapolis Institute of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Tate, Museum of Modern Art and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Distinctions recorded are Padma Shri in arts.

• Name — Raghubir Singh • Born — 22 October 1942 • Birthplace — Jaipur, India • Died — 18 April 1999 • Place of death — New York, US • Notable Works — Ganga: Sacred River of India (1974) River of Colour: The India of Raghubir Singh (1998) • Style — Documentary, street • Occupation — Photographer • Years Active — 1965–1999 • Website — www.raghubirsingh.com

Singh was born into an aristocratic Rajput family in 1942 in Jaipur. His grandfather was Commander-in-chief of the Jaipur Armed Forces, while his father was a Thakur or feudal landowner of Khetri (now in Jhunjhunu district, Rajasthan). After independence, his family saw a dwindling of its fortune. As a schoolboy, he discovered Beautiful Jaipur, Cartier-Bresson's little-known book published in 1948, which inspired his interest in photography. After his schooling at St. Xavier's School, Jaipur, he joined the Hindu College (Delhi) but dropped out in his first year. It was here that he took a serious interest in photography.

In addition to his photographic work, Singh taught in New York at the School of Visual Arts, Columbia University and Cooper Union.

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."

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.

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. In February 1999, what had been intended as a mid-career retrospective exhibition of his work opened at the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, after showing at the Bon Marché in Paris and the Art Institute of Chicago.

• 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 • 1991 Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, Arizona • 1992 Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas • 1992 Sewall Art Gallery, Houston, Texas • 1992 Piramal Gallery, National Center for Performing Arts, Bombay • 1994 Piramal Gallery, National Center for Performing Arts, Bombay • 1994 Burden Gallery, Aperture Foundation, New York • 1995 Max Mueller Bhawan, New Delhi • 1998 Feature Inc., New York • 1999 National Gallery of Modern Art, Bombay • 1999 National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi • 1999 The Art Institute of Chicago • 2001 The Museum of Photography, Tel-Hai • 2002 Foundation Querini Stampalia, Venice • 2003 Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC • 2004 Sepia Gallery, New York • 2005 National Museum of Photography, Bradford • 2005 Galerie f5.6, Munich • 2005 Paris Photo • 2006 Lille 3000: Colysée de Lambersart • 2006 Lille 3000: Maison Folie, Wazemmes • 2008 The Gallery at Hermès, New York and Berlin (with Dayanita Singh) • 2017 The Met Breuer, New York (Modernism on the Ganges: Raghubir Singh Photographs)