The Caravan — February 2018

82 THE CARAVAN

out of focus · books

cess followed quickly. By the 1980s, he

was displaying at respected galleries,

even museums, and was admired by the

world photo-community, particularly

New York’s street photography circle.

He shot manically through these years,

with an eye toward making photo books,

13 of which he published before his sud-

den death, at the age of 56, in 1999. A

fourteenth was released posthumously.

Singh died soon after a major exhi-

bition of his, titled “River of Color,”

opened at the Art Institute of Chicago.

His star has waned somewhat since,

and the present show, the first on this

scale in two decades, is angled as a sort

of corrective. It has been largely suc-

cessful in this regard; “Modernism” was

rapturously reviewed in the US press.

There is also a sense that Singh is

being canonised in India. The Indian

novelists and art critics who wrote the

catalogue essays for the exhibition are

certainly in no doubt about his stature.

Photographers, including his friend

Ram Rahman and protégés Ketaki Seth

and Sooni Taraporevala, paid homage

at recent symposiums. The Reliance

Foundation was kind enough to fund

the show, which ran smoothly until

the New York-based artist Jaishri Abi-

chandani alleged, on the radio station

WNYC, that Singh sexually abused her

in the 1990s. The South Asian Women’s

Creative Collective, which she is a part

of, staged a silent protest-performance

outside the museum in early December.

“I have a very simple goal,” Abichan-

dani told the Huffington Post, “which

is that when you Google Raghubir, this

will come up.” (The MET supported

Abichandani’s right to protest.)

what does it mean to be a pioneer of

colour photography? Most saliently, it

means to go against the grain. “When

above: Ganapati Immersion,

Chowpatty, Bombay,

Maharashtra, 1989

succession raghubir singh