Raghubir Singh: River of Color
Contemporary Indian photographer Raghubir Singh does not manipulate his images as far as I can tell; this is relatively straight photography. Yet his color sense reminded me of the earlier tradition of hand-painting photos. Indeed, Singh refers to that tradition (and others in the history of Indian art) in the introduction to his book River of Color, which accompanies this Art Institute exhibit of 86 of his photographs, most from the last two decades.
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While exhibition titles are often self-consciously cute and inappropriate, this one is perfect: Singh’s photos, seen individually or as a group, are like a river of contrasting colors–bright garments against an otherwise bleak slum, green fields against a blue sky, a shiny automobile against a bland facade. And Singh depicts often chaotic Indian life in compositions that are rarely geometric or formally self-enclosed. Unlike many Western art photographers, who impose preconceived ways of seeing on their material, Singh lets his subjects determine his vision. The peacock with tail feathers spread in one image could serve as a metaphor for Singh’s work: there’s an element of proud display somewhat at odds with the rest of the composition, including pigeons around the peacock and some greenery a bit like its plumage, though not so much it seems an echo. Similarly, the multiple images in Pavement Mirror Shop–each mirror offering a different view of the street–seems an exaggerated, somewhat distorted version of most of the images in the show, which offer multiple perspectives.
In 1966, when he was a young man, Singh encountered the famous French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson during one of the several trips he made to photograph India. Watching him work for a few days, Singh was impressed (“He was an original!”), and today he calls him the “first artist-photographer to look at Indians as individuals.” Yet Cartier-Bresson’s photos of India–insofar as they can be judged from the book Henri Cartier-Bresson in India–are very different from Singh’s. Though Cartier-Bresson was clearly open to India’s crowds, contradictions, and chaos, he organized most of his pictures around a single focal point or central direction: a key person in the center of a crowd, pilgrims all facing one way. His 1948 photo of Mahatma Gandhi’s funeral pyre–taken on his first trip to India–places the pyre at the exact center of the image, surrounded by crowds. Singh’s 1984 Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s Funeral, by contrast, is taken from the point of view of someone in the midst of the crowd. The funeral pyre is central but distant, much smaller than in Cartier-Bresson’s image; the central foreground is dominated by a person reading a newspaper, seen from behind.
