Modernism on the Ganges
In her book, On Photography, Susan Sontag describes photography as an act of non-intervention, ‘… moving through a panorama of disparate events’. This notion can be seen in the work of those who took to the streets with their cameras, such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, William Gedney and Lee Friedlander, disavowing staged settings and hackneyed configurations in their efforts to depict everyday reality as they saw it. Sudden passing moments and odd juxtapositions of people and objects recorded in black and white characterised their representations of the pulse of places at different times in history—thereby introducing a distinct visual code about what was worth looking at.
Raghubir Singh’s posthumous survey exhibition, Modernism on the Ganges, shown almost two decades after his untimely death in 1999, included photographs that fall squarely within this realm—except Singh went one step further, using colour to bring the variety and vibrancy of India to his audience. By deliberately bucking against the dismissal of colour photography, which was deemed coarse and tasteless by the likes of Bresson, Gedney, and Friedlander, whom Singh considered as his mentors, Singh brought a completely different energy that he believed was vital to a reflection of life in his homeland. He elucidates this idea in his book River of Color, published in 1998, in which he wrote ‘The fundamental condition of India is the cycle of rebirth, in which color is not just an essential element, but also a deep inner source’.
In the early years, Singh’s images focused on villages and sacred sites from the Himalayas down to the Bay of Bengal. His photographs from the late 1960s until the mid-’70s appear to be flooded with commonplace images
Raghubir Singh, Man Diving, Ganges Floods, Benares, Uttar Pradesh, 1985. Photograph © 2017 Succession Raghubir Singh.
Raghubir Singh, Pavement Mirror Shop, Howrah, West Bengal, 1991. Photograph © 2017 Succession Raghubir Singh.
