88 THE CARAVAN
out of focus · books
have been tricky and painful for Singh.
Then again, it could have led to some-
thing new and beautiful.singh coined the phrase “Modernism
on the Ganges” to describe his mature
work, much of which was on display at
the Breuer. By the mid 1980s, he was
no longer reliant on foreign magazines,
and worked independently. The images
then are his best work; their limitations
cannot be excused.
Among these images, his signature
shot is a version of the tableau, which
often features a small to medium-sized
group of individuals, arranged in strik-
ing formal patterns, in a representative
milieu. Morning on Panchganga Ghat,
Benares, Uttar Pradesh (1985) is a good
example.
People ascend and descend steps at a
ghat. The figures are carefully spread
out, almost like the hands of clock,“When men cannot
observe,” Naipaul wrote,
“they don’t have ideas;
they have obsessions.”
This statement could
be a caption to Singh’s
career. His failure to
meaningfully adapt
modernism essentially
boils down to fear.doing away with the idea of “subject”
entirely.
Rahman convincingly shows how
Singh came to adopt these attitudes.
Consider Crawford Market, Bombay,
Maharashtra (1993), published in Bom-
bay. Shot—for once—from within the
thick of things, the picture shows a
band of porters, alternately blurred and
in focus, who are drinking tea. From
the bottom-left corner a large arm in-
trudes, carrying a brass pot and pour-
ing tea into a white cup, and from the
upper-right border two legs descend to
rest on a mango crate. (The anonymous
limbs are an homage to Friedlander,
who often deployed a similar trope.)
From experiments with focus and
multilayered composition to frag-
mented form and cut frame, there is so
much happening in this photograph.
Nevertheless, the image leaves you
cold. You cannot shake off the impres-
sion that Singh’s shot is somehow
unadventurous, fit for the BBC Travel
section. This is not a criticism of exotic
subject matter (though critics such as
Max Kozloff describe the scene as ex-
otic—in praise). It is an issue of human
presence, or rather, the lack of it, on
the part of the subjects and on the part
of the photographer.
Rahman considers Singh’s interac-
tion with American modernism in
purely formal terms. But form and
sensibility are inseparable. The great
modernist American photographers
produced an extraordinarily personal
body of work. Winnogrand, for exam-
ple, savagely roamed New York’s streets
and his photographs are practically
giddy with the excitement of social
observation. Gedney, who cut his teeth
shooting the rural poor in Eastern Ken-
tucky, made images of heroic sensual-
ity. Arbus shot double-edged portraits
of people on the margins of society:
giants, cross dressers, nudists and so
forth. And then there is Friedlander,
Singh’s “master modernist of our time,”
whose self-reflexive photographs are
suffused with a sense of alienation.
Singh’s work is disappointingly im-
personal by comparison. His image of
the Crawford market tea stall is like a
stencil of modernism. The composition
is refined, but it does not correspond to
a new way of looking. His essential atti-
tude towards his subject is no different
than what it was in Rajasthan.
To his credit, Singh admitted as
much, or admitted something like it.
Though he fervently praised modernist
photography, he also distanced himself
from the tradition. “However gifted
the Indian photographer might be,” he
writes in River of Color:However personal and intimate
his or her photographs, he or she
will find it a quixotic quest to bond
oneself to the Eurocentric Western
canon of photography, in which the
contemporary concepts of morality
and guilt push aside the idea of beau-
ty. Beauty, nature, humanism and
spirituality are the four cornerstones
of the continuous culture of India.“Morality” and “guilt,” for Singh,
might roughly translate to social en-
gagement and self-awareness. As for
“beauty,” “nature” and the rest—this
is simply escapist nonsense. American
modernists offered a rounded picture of
social life and human possibility. Their
work explored desire, shame, frater-
nity, guilt and loneliness, as well as joy
and delight. Singh shied away from this
challenge, embracing the rosy abstrac-
tion of India’s “continuous culture,”
like the intellectuals Naipaul described.
Photographs, in his conception, should
not depict reality or express a complex
inner state. They should simply comfort
us and convey joy.
“When men cannot observe,” Nai-
paul wrote, “they don’t have ideas;
they have obsessions.” This statement
could be a caption to Singh’s career. His
failure to meaningfully adapt modern-
ism essentially boils down to fear. To
develop an individual voice, you have
to go through some introspection. This
in turn necessarily involves a social
reckoning. Just as you have to figure
out the colours you like and dislike, you
have to figure out who you are trained
to see and who you are trained to look
past. As someone at the crosshairs of
privilege (wealth; caste; class) and mar-
ginalisation (he was a photographer in
a country that had no time for photog-
raphy) the re-evaluation would likely