4 ideas
Singh argues that Indian photographers work in colour because colour runs through Indian life as a living thread: in dress, ritual, festival, and the long tradition of Rajput and Mughal miniature painting. Colour is therefore not an added layer of decoration but the medium through which the subject itself is structured and understood. Using black-and-white in India strips out the very information that carries meaning.
Singh treats the black-and-white tradition, Cartier-Bresson's 'decisive moment' included, as an instrument shaped by Western history and temperament. In his reading, its monochrome gravity expresses a European sensibility of doubt, loss and existential darkness. It is not a neutral standard of seriousness. Seen this way, a technical convention reveals itself as a cultural import, and adopting it uncritically means seeing one's own country through someone else's inner weather.
Instead of isolating a single decisive subject, Singh builds frames with many simultaneous centres, layered planes and overlapping activity. This draws on the dense, all-over narrative space of Indian miniature painting. The method matches form to a place where life is lived in crowds and in simultaneity, so the picture's structure carries the character of the society it shows.
Raghubir Singh (1942–1999) was born in Jaipur and taught himself photography. From the late 1960s he committed to colour at a time when serious art and documentary photography treated colour as commercial or vulgar. Across books on the Ganges, Calcutta, Rajasthan and other regions he made a sustained body of colour work on India, gathered in the 1998 retrospective 'River of Colour' shortly before his death. His career is a working test case of whether a peripheral practitioner can overturn a dominant aesthetic by insisting that the local subject demands its own form.