87out of focus · booksFEBRUARY 2018a man with his feeling for the past. He fell in love with Rajput court
painting. Indian art in general became a life-long passion; Singh
later turned to it to explain his own theories about the pictorial de-
piction of social life.
If this discovery led him inwards and backward (not in the pejora-
tive sense), the next would take him outwards and forward. In 1969,
Singh met William Gedney, a Brooklyn-based photographer who
was then in Benares on a Fulbright fellowship. The two became fast
friends. Around this time, Singh began travelling abroad for work,
and soon, through Gedney, he broke into New York’s modernist
street-photography circle, then at the very forefront of the medium’s
stylistic innovations.
Critics unanimously agree that these events changed Singh’s work,
though their reasoning tends to be quite shallow. Rahman has made
the case most eloquently. In a lecture delivered at the Delhi Photo
Festival in 2013, Rahman contrasted Singh’s images from the 1970s
with those from the late 1980s and 1990s, noting the startling change
in the style of composition. The earlier photos are expository and
neatly laid out, conceived above all to convey information and depict
a scene. But Singh’s encounter with American modernism changed
all this. Photographers such as Friedlander had taken up a more
self-conscious, almost existentially formal attitude towards image-
making: layering images, ruthlessly cutting the frame, sometimessuccession raghubir singh