Basic Critical Theory for Photographers

9 Raghubir Singh, River of Colour

Introduction to River of Colour

Raghubir Singh is regarded as one of the key Indian photographers of the twentieth century, this essay was written a year before his untimely death in 1999 and is the introduction to a retrospective of his work. As a photographer of international standing who knew many of the leading Western photographers of his time, he was well placed to comment on the differences between Indian photography and Western photography.

Singh starts by quoting from Sri Aurobindo’s The Foundations of Indian Culture ‘There is that universal beauty which is seen by the inner eye [. . .] . . . but different races or individual consciousnesses form different standards of aesthetic harmony’ (p. 9). He goes ...