Raghubir singh: books
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Raghubir Singh, 1942–1999
Raghubir Singh, who died in April, was the most widely published of all photographers of India. Born and raised in Jaipur, Rajasthan, he eschewed the tradition of black-and-white photography in his thirteen books of images of India: Indeed, he considered color to be intrinsic to the culture of the subcontinent. As he wrote in his final collection, Rivers of Color, which shares its title with his recent Art Institute of Chicago retrospective, color is the “fountain of the continuum of life” in India.
Singh, who was a lecturer at New York’s School of the Visual Arts at the time of his death, was deeply conscious of the traditions of photography both in the West and in India, where as a young man he observed Henri Cartier-Bresson at work. Like another of his heroes, the filmmaker Satyajit Ray, he was not afraid to borrow from the West. In spite of this, his photographs—masterfully framed images, often taken through doorways and windows or from reflections off glass and water—are products of his insights into the multicultu
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The pioneering photographer who captured beauty amid the chaos of modernising India
Born to an aristocratic family in Jaipur on Oct. 22, 1942, Raghubir Singh received his first camera, a gift from his brother, at the age of 14.
That marked the beginning of his lifelong fascination with photography, which would eventually lead to a career spent living in Hong Kong, Paris, and New York. As a photojournalist, he contributed to the New York Times Magazine, Time, and National Geographic, among others. But right up to his death in 1999, and despite all his travels, Singh’s most important subject was his native India.
Until Jan. 02, 2018, the Met Breuer, part of New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, is hosting a retrospective of Singh’s work, featuring 85 of his photographs shot in the country, alongside examples of the colourful Mughal-era court paintings that he was inspired by.
At a time when colour photography was dismissed as unserious by many professional photographers, Singh embraced it to capture the many different realities of modern India, recording vivid street scene
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Raghubir Singh (photographer)
Indian photographer
Raghubir Singh (1942–1999) was an Indian photographer, most known for his landscapes and documentary-style photographs of the people of India.[1] 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.[2][3]
Singh belonged to a tradition of small-format street photography, working in color, that to him, represented the intrinsic value of Indian aesthetics.[4] According to his 2004 retrospective his "documentary-style vision was neither sugarcoated, nor abject, nor controllingly omniscient".[5][6] Deeply influenced by modernism, he liberally took inspiration from Rajasthani miniatures, Mughal paintings and Bengal, a place where he thought western modernist ideas and vern
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