I was recommended by my tutor to look at the work of Raghubir Singh (1942-1999). Raghubir was a self-taught photographer who worked in India and lived in Paris, London and New York and during his career 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. His work has been acclaimed for their organization of space and reflect multiple aspects of India at the time. I have to say that I was really struck by some of his images. I loved his color images; they are really vivid and the subject matter is so close to my heart, documentary style street photography. He captures wonderful colors but at the same time his images are evocative and tell wonderful stories. Because of his wonderful treatment I was reminded of Steve McCurry's work which has the same brilliant use of color.
I was also struck by his approach, according to his 2004 retrospective, he created “a documentary-style vision was neither sugarcoated, nor abject, nor controllingly omniscient”. I like that. I don’t see why documentary style photography has to be only about documenting social issues like hunger, poverty, crime etc. It can extend to documenting life (which is often banal) and culture.
Most of images were shot with a small format cameras. He was lucky in that he was able to meet and work with a number of master photographers during his life, including, Henri Cartier Bresson, Robert Frank and Lee Friedlander.
Singh published 14 well-received books on the Ganges, Calcutta, Benares, his native Rajasthan, Grand Trunk Road, and the Hindustan Ambassador car, and today his work is part of the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, amongst others.
I have only managed to find some of his images on the web but what I saw were very compelling. I love the way he frames his images. A number his images are taken from inside of a car so you can see the view through the windscreen and at the same there is another image superimposed in the rear view mirror. Lots of work with reflections and mirrors which really speak to me.
