The Caravan — February 2018

83

out of focus · books

FEBRUARY 2018

Singh’s images suggest

that he struggled to

engage emotionally with

his subjects, who were

ordinary Indians from a

wide spectrum of class

and caste backgrounds.

dogma from day one. He instinctually

shot his first photos in colour, and never

switched, finding black and white too

austere. The choice brought him much

ridicule early on, especially from Amer-

ican colleagues. But over time they

came to appreciate what he was doing.

Today, colour is precisely what Singh is

most lauded for, though the praise can

often seem incidental to his craft.

Singh shot almost exclusively in In-

dia. Latching onto this, several critics

have argued—and new critics continue

to argue—that his subject matter merits

a special format. Their essential claim

is that colour suits India because... well,

because India is colourful. For obvious

reasons, this tends to be the foreign

line. Thus the conceptual artist John

Baldessari, whom Fineman quotes in

the catalogue, has praised Singh for

tackling India’s “visual bombardment

and overload ... the punctuation of color

made vivid by its being surrounded by

drabness.” Indians are not averse to

the idea either, though their reason-

ing is usually more roundabout. “One

singular quality of his photographs,”

the art historian Partha Mitter argues

in his catalogue essay, “is the balance

of intensity and saturation in the range

of colors that adds essential drama and

texture to the bustling humanity in his

images.” (Meaning that the “bustling

humanity” must be brought to life with

colour? Or just that colour compliments,

as Mitter claims later, “the sheer pictur-

esque quality” of India?)

The novelist Amit Chaudhuri takes

the opposite stance in his catalogue es-

say. Colour, he argues, allowed Singh

to a turn away from subject matter and

representation more broadly. His real

subject was joy. Chaudhuri sees this as

a characteristically Indian response.

“Tragedy, calamity, conflict, loss—these

constitute a story or theme,” he writes,

whereas “Joy and its smaller secular

cousin, happiness, are not, accord-

ing to Western aesthetic parameters,

subjects.” As an aesthetic argument,

this does not hold water; much writ-

ing about childhood, a major theme

in western literature, is about joy. But

the flawed logic is of interest in that it

reflects another prevailing idea: that

Singh captured un-didactic “slices of

life,” and that this turn away from nar-

rative is innately praiseworthy.

It is telling that neither theory ad-

dresses the social valence of Singh’s

project. That would entail dealing with

class, both the representation of class,

and the class-privilege innate in the

turn away from representation.

Singh’s images suggest that he

struggled to engage emotionally with

his subjects (of course there are ex-

ceptions), who were ordinary Indians

from a wide spectrum of class and

caste backgrounds. This is perfectly

understandable. As a semi-royal Rajput

pursuing an elite art form, it would

have been disingenuous for him to act

like one of the gang (at the time, there

were heavy import duties on cameras

and film, and access to equipment was a

rare privilege). The strange thing is that

Singh never addressed this fundamen-

tal issue. Instead, with striking non-

chalance, he depicted tableaus ranging

from day-to-day street life to popular

religious processions to extreme pov-

erty, always finding something of visual

interest, usually something to do with

colour, incidental to the human drama

at hand. As a result, his images have a

sort of split personality. Their captions

read like social tags—A Tribesman,

Gujarat-Madhya Pradesh Border; Slum

Dweller; Dharavi; Holi Revellers, Jodh-

pur—while the pictures are anything

but individual or group portraits.

Consider Employees, Morvi Palace

Gujarat (1982). Set, it seems, in the large

living room of the palace, it depicts two

servants, squatting on their haunches

and scrubbing the floor. The picture is

framed with an eye to pattern and his-

torical irony. The gaudy and shiny mod-

ern cabinets contrast against elegantly

patterned tiles, just as one servant’s

sari is garishly modern and the other is

somberly traditional. As in the Pushkar

scene, Singh also deploys his favourite

human-object trope. Four circles have

been etched on to the glass doors of the

cabinets in the middle of the room, a

series which neatly continues onto one

servant’s sari.

It can be said that this is a non-

didactic “slice of life” that revels in

the play of colour. Neither observation

negates the simple and overwhelming

Singh began taking pictures in the mid-
1960s,” the curator Mia Fineman writes
in the catalogue, “black-and-white film
was firmly established as the preferred
idiom of art photography.” That judg-
ment was upheld in several budding tra-
ditions. Consider “New Documents,” a
legendary 1967 exhibition at New York’s
Museum of Modern Art. The show
brought together the work of three pio-
neering American photographers: Gary
Winnogrand, who shot dynamic photos
of street life; Lee Friedlander, whose
work was more austerely self-reflexive;
and Diane Arbus, who explored a form
of gothic portraiture. All three shot in
monochrome, as did most serious pho-
tojournalists. The medium held twin
attractions: it was more direct and in-
contestable; yet the two-tone limitation
allowed for expression.
Singh’s great achievement, or so
the story goes, is that he resisted this