Raghubir Singh

Raghubir Singh (born Oct. 22, 1942, Jaipur, India—died April 18, 1999, New York, N.Y., U.S.) was an Indian photographer noted for his evocative documentation of the landscape and peoples of India.

Educated in art at Hindu College in New Delhi, Singh was self-trained in photography. His own creative work was inspired by Henri Cartier-Bresson’s images of India, which Singh discovered while still a youth; in 1966 he met the French photographer and was able to observe how he worked. Unlike Cartier-Bresson, however, Singh used colour film, which he felt to be supremely suited to the visual scene in his homeland. From 1974, when he started to freelance, until 1976, when he moved to Europe, he worked mainly out of New Delhi, providing images to such periodicals as National Geographic, Life, and Der Stern.

At various times Singh resided in Paris and New York, but no matter where he lived, he always felt his “roots to be in India” with its greatly varied landscape and baffling social complexity. Over the course of his career, he published 12 books of photographs of colour images, each concerned with a different region. The earliest of his books, Ganga: Sacred River of India (1974), revealed the photographer’s enchantment with the myths and ceremonies associated with that river. Later he photographed the people of Rajasthan, Kashmir, Varanasi, and Calcutta, among other places.

In part because of Singh’s use of colour, these works were criticized as travel books rather than documentations of reality, but Singh denied that he glamourized India. In his own defense, he stated, “I realized fairly early there was no contradiction between sadness or poverty, and colour.” The last book published during his life was River of Colour: The India of Raghubir Singh (1998). It was followed by the posthumously published A Way into India (2002). Whatever is ultimately made of Singh’s artistry, his breathtaking images of Indian scenes made widely available impressive visions of the country he loved.