Raghubir Singh
Color and Humanity on the Ganges
This is an amazing, refreshing display of color and humanity at the Met Breuer through January 2nd. His street photography is seemingly playful but at the same time, we feel his serious dedication to bringing breathtaking images to our eyes. He succeeded time and again. Raghubir Singh was a pioneer of color street photography and worked prolifically from the late 1960’s until his death in 1999 at age 56. He recorded India’s dense landscape in complex freeze like compositions with pulsating opulent colors.
Singh embraced color as part of a continuous Indian aesthetic tradition which reaches back to the miniature paintings of the Mughal period. He was also deeply influenced by Henri Cartier-Bresson ( whom he met in Jaipur), filmmaker Satyajit Ray and American photographers like Lee Friedlander. He traveled his own path within his own culture and delivered deliriously wonderful images. They are truly some of the finest street photographs ever taken from a human standpoint and from a compositional one.
