Wednesday October 11

The Met Breuer

10am – 5:30pm | Exhibition Viewing

Modernism on the Ganges: Raghubir Singh Photographs


The exhibition will trace the full trajectory of the color street photography pioneer’s career from his early work as a photojournalist in the late 1960s through his last unpublished projects of the late 1990s. Using a handheld camera and color slide film, Singh recorded India’s dense milieu in complex frieze-like compositions, teeming with incident, fractured by reflections, and pulsating with opulent color. He embraced color as part of a continuous Indian aesthetic tradition that reaches back to the miniature paintings of the Mughal period, while being also deeply influenced by the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson (whom he met in Jaipur in 1966), Bengali filmmaker Satyajit Ray, and American street photographers such as William Gedney and Lee Friedlander.

 
The Met Breuer> MAP
945 Madison Ave (at 75th St)

Above: Raghubir Singh (Indian, 1942–1999). Pavement Mirror Shop, Howrah, West Bengal, 1991. Chromogenic print, 19 1/2 × 29 1/2 in. (49.5 × 74.9 cm). Collection of Cynthia Hazen Polsky. Photograph copyright © 2017 Succession Raghubir Singh.