Raghubir Singh, a pioneer of color street photography, worked and published prolifically from the late 1960s until his sudden death in 1999. Born into an aristocratic family in Rajasthan, Singh was a thoroughly cosmopolitan artist. He lived abroad for most of his adult life—in Hong Kong, Paris, London, and New York—but his eye was perpetually drawn back to his native India. Working with a handheld camera and color slide film, he recorded the country's dense milieu in complex frieze-like compositions, teeming with incident, fractured by reflections, and pulsating with opulent color.

The acquisition of twenty-one photographs dramatically expands the Met's collection of Singh's work, touching on all of his major iconographic themes: rivers and floods, religious devotion, the controlled chaos of city streets, and the residues of colonialism in modern Indian culture. The group includes Singh's first mature work, the classically composed Monsoon Rains, Monghyr, Bihar of 1967, which focuses on a cluster of four women on the banks of the Ganges, huddled against the monsoon winds. The image announces Singh's lifelong preoccupation with "the geographical culture of India" and the intricate intertwining of land, climate, and tradition. Also included in this selection are masterful photographs made in the artist's home state of Rajasthan, in the holy city of Benares (now Varanasi), and on the bustling streets of Calcutta and Bombay (now Kolkata and Mumbai, respectively).

Deeply influenced by the work of American street photographers such as Lee Friedlander, Singh was also a connoisseur of Mughal miniature painting and other traditional arts of India. As he traveled along his own artistic path, he forged a distinctively Indian style of modern photography—a cultivated amalgam of Western and South Asian modes of picturing the world that stands, as he put it, "on the Ganges side of modernism."