91out of focus · booksFEBRUARY 2018that people are thinking and, more
importantly, make us want to know
what they are thinking. Only then will
the subjects’ inner lives, withheld from
us by the mute image, be a source of
aching drama. Webb’s characters are
unforgettable, even if we know noth-
ing about them. Singh’s are flat, passive
rather than pensive; he was himself
uninterested in them.
Most of the provincial and rural im-
ages on display suffer the same weak-
nesses: Singh has little interest in peo-
ple, and his style is not interesting.
Something different happens in the
metropolis. Here he responds to the
built environment, reading larger so-
cial and historical shifts in objects and
monuments. The result is a form of
modernist critical analysis. Singh re-
mains emotionally absent, but his mind
is set to work. His key (but by no means
only) insight, as Chaudhuri persuasively
explains, is that globalisation separates
a city from its own past. A case in point
is Victoria Terminus, Bombay, Maha-
rashtra (1991), which shows the great
building in Bombay through a blue fly-
net held up by a passing vendor.
On occasion, Singh used the chaos
of modernisation as a sort of formal
challenge. Consider Subhas Chandra
Bose Statue, Calcutta, West Bengal
(1986). The statue, located in the far
background, is framed by the pane-
less square window of an olive-green
open door crookedly hanging in the
foreground, which in turn is cut off by
an anonymous human hand. A bright
white government bus in the middle
distance enters (or exits) the frame
from the left. Finally, right at the
frame’s centre are two legs, belonging
to a man, strangely bent over so that his
torso is covered by the door.
For all the differing textures, layers
of focus, and forms, the image feels
harmoniously composed. The statue
far away and the window up close; the
white bus on the left and green door on
the right; the jutting hand and dangling
legs: every locus of interest has a coun-
terpoint. Nor is the sense of calm artifi-
cial. Though the statue’s contemporary
irrelevance is clearly framed, there is
no melodrama over ruin or repugnance
towards commerce. The ambiguousjumble of change and stasis has been
calmly accepted.
Social change is a more complex mat-
ter and Singh does his best to register
it from afar. In this regard, Ganapati
Immersion, Chowpatty, Bombay, Ma-
harashtra (1989) can be chalked up as a
success. The image, which Singh seems
to have been shot while knee-deep in
water, shows a mass of people in the sea,
some with their clothes coloured pink,
standing around a large Ganesh statue.
Though you can make out a few people
further back in the scene, the water in
the foreground blurs most of the indi-
viduals, imbuing them with a collective
identity. It is a poignant, if convenient,
scene; the shabby pink shirts plangently
rhyming with Ganesh’s skin.
This sort of studied blurring will
not work up close. But Singh’s diorama
logic called for portraits. Consider Slum
Dweller, Dharavi (1984). Shot from a
slum lane, the camera peers up into the
opening of a loft, out of which a man, his
face smeared in grime, looks out uncom-
fortably. Beside him, the legs of a wom-
an extend down a wooden staircase. Her
pink sari is visible up to her waist, above
which she is covered by the slum’s walls.
Beneath the man, an electric-blue metal
sheet, largely eroded by rust, makes for
a sharp contrast with the pink. To the
far left—Singh has a genius for latitudi-
nal arrangement—two garments, yellow
and violet, hang to dry. He is plainly tak-
en by the vivid colours, and would like
us to join in on the fun. Singh’s aesthetic
instinct is shocking in the context. The
“slum dweller” has been reduced to an
animal caught in headlights.
Pavement Mirror Shop (1991) is the
best photo on view. An intricate grid
of reflections, it includes three or four
street scenes in miniature, and a band
of people in the background, seen
through a gap in the hanging mirrors.
The scene is as “non-narrative” as any
Singh captured. The difference is that,
for once, he put himself on the page. In
the blurred surface of a mirror, hung
near the frame’s upper border, you see
his eyes pressed against his camera. He
is looking at himself, and the people
around him, aware that the two are
somehow related. Too bad he stopped
looking. ssuccession raghubir singh