The exhibition will trace the full trajectory of Singh's career from his early work as a photojournalist in the late 1960s through his last unpublished projects of the late 1990s. Using a handheld camera and color slide film, he recorded India's dense milieu in complex frieze-like compositions, teeming with incident, fractured by reflections, and pulsating with opulent color. Singh embraced color as part of a continuous Indian aesthetic tradition that reaches back to the miniature paintings of the Mughal period (1526–1857). He was also deeply influenced by the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson (whom he met in Jaipur in 1966), Bengali filmmaker Satyajit Ray, and American street photographers such as William Gedney and Lee Friedlander, whose works will be on view in the exhibition. As he traveled along his own artistic path, Singh forged a distinctively Indian style of modernist photography that stands, as he put it, "on the Ganges side of modernism, rather than the Seine or East River side of it."

 

 

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and supported by the Samuel I. Newhouse Foundation, Inc.

 

Education programs include Reflections on Raghubir Singh, with filmmaker Mira Nair (Monsoon Wedding, The Namesake), photographer and screenwriter Sooni Taraporevala, and photographer Ketaki Sheth about Raghubir Singh's influence on their work. Friday, October 27 at 6:30 pm in the Bonnie J. Sacerdote Lecture Hall at The Met Fifth Avenue.