Born in Jaipur, Raghubir Singh was a self-taught photographer who worked in India and lived in Paris, London and New York. 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. In his early work Singh focused on the geographic and social anatomy of cities and regions of India. His work on Bombay in the early 1990s marks a turning point in his stylistic development; at the contact of the metropolis his visual language acquires a new complexity. In addition to his photographic work, Singh teaches in New York at the School of Visual Arts, Columbia University and Cooper Union. In 1998 the Art Institute of Chicago organized a retrospective exhibition of his work which was still on show at the time of his death. The book River of Colour was published on the occasion of this exhibition. In his last work A Way into India, published posthumously, the Ambassador car becomes a camera obscura. Singh uses its doors and windshield to frame and divide his photographs. In the accompanying text John Baldessari compares Raghubir Singh to Orson Welles for his juxtaposition of near and far and to Mondrian for his fragmentation of space. In recent years a dialogue has been established between his work and that of contemporary artists. Raghubir Singh is considered a pioneer of color photography. In the 1970s he was one of the first photographers to reinvent the use of color at a time when color photography was still widely unconsidered. His photographs, acclaimed for their organization of space, reflect the multiple aspects of contemporary India.
Posted on: Thu, 27 Jun 2013 17:51:03 +0000
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