Born in Jaipur, Raghubir Singh was a self-taught photographer who worked in India and lived in Paris, London and New York. In the early 1970s he was one of the first photographers to reinvent the use of color at a time when color photography was still a marginal art form.

In his early work Singh focused on the geographic and social anatomy of cities and regions of India. His work on Bombay in the early 1990s marks a turning point in his stylistic development; at the contact of the metropolis his visual language acquires a new complexity. In addition to his photographic work, Singh teaches in New York at the School of Visual Arts, Columbia University and Cooper Union. In 1998 the Art Institute of Chicago organized a retrospective exhibition of his work which was still on show at the time of his death. The book River of Colour was published on the occasion of this exhibition.

In his last work A Way into India, published posthumously, the Ambassador car becomes a camera obscura. Singh uses its doors and windshield to frame and divide his photographs. In the accompanying text John Baldessari compares Raghubir Singh to Orson Welles for his juxtaposition of near and far and to Mondrian for his fragmentation of space. In recent years a dialogue has been established between his work and that of contemporary artists

From Library Journal

This is the first retrospective collection of the work of Indian photographer Singh (The Grand Trunk Road: A Passage Through India, Aperture, 1995), whose work is in the permanent collections of several major U.S. museums. Singh has been compared to Henri Cartier-Bresson in his ability to capture the day-to-day life of ordinary people. In the book's preface, David Travis, curator of photography at the Art Institute of Chicago, remarks that in Singh's photographs, "the wise and mad cultural heritage of India is out in the streets for everyone to see." Unlike Cartier-Bresson, however, Singh uses color with aplomb. In his introductory essay, "River of Color: An Indian View," Singh voices his theories about color, photography, and art in general. This large-format volume features 128 full-page and two-page color photographs, divided by theme. They are followed by four pages of notes. Highly recommended for photography and art collections.?Ravi Shenoy, Hinsdale P.L., IL

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The New York Times Book Review, Andy Grundberg

At their best his pictures are filled with narrative incident and visual surprise, in a manner that is based in the decisive-moment approach of Henri Cartier-Bresson but that also is indebted to the more radical framing of Garry Winogrand. Of all of Singh's books to date, this is the most essential and stirring.