Image Credit: Raghubir Singh, Crawford Market, Bombay, 1993; Copyright © Succession Raghubir Singh.

A Symposium on the Photography of Raghubir Singh: Engagements with "Modernism on the Ganges," an Exhibition at the Met Breuer
Featuring:
Max Kozloff, former art critic for The Nation and executive editor of Artforum, and photographer and writer
Glenn Lowry, Director, Museum of Modern Art, New York, and writer and art historian
Ram Rahman, independent curator and photographer and founder member of SAHMAT collective

Moderated by Gauri Viswanathan, Class of 1933 Professor in the Humanities, Department of English and Comparative Literature; Director, South Asia Institute
Co-sponsored by the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures at Barnard College, and the Heyman Center for the Humanities

Max Kozloff is a former art critic for The Nation and executive editor of Artforum, where he was also associate and contributing editor. He earned a BA and MA at the University of Chicago, and studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and the NYU Institute of Fine Arts. He has taught at Yale, NYU, and Cooper Union, among other schools. He has been awarded Pulitzer, Fulbright, and Guggenheim fellowships, and in 1990, the International Center of Photography Prize for Excellence in Writing on Photography. As a photographer, he has exhibited in museums and galleries around the world, including one-man shows in New York, Bombay, London, Mexico City, Tel Aviv, and group shows in New York, Zurich, Paris, Bonn, and Havana. He is the author of fifteen books, including the seminal New York: Capital of Photography (2002) and Theater of the Face: Portrait Photography Since 1900 (2007). He has also published numerous portfolios of photographs, among them India’s Streets (1997). Kozloff often chooses photographic subjects that pay tribute to the photographers who have figured prominently in his writing: shop windows that reference Eugène Atget, for example, or street scenes informed by Henri Cartier-Bresson’s narrative compositions. He asks not only “What is it they show?” but also “Why do we look?”, drawing attention to larger issues of image-making and social construction, while also focusing on the particular reality of the photographs.

Glenn Lowry is Director of The Museum of Modern Art in New York since 1995. He received a BA from Williams College, and MA and PhD degrees in the history of art from Harvard University, and has been awarded honorary degrees from the College of William and Mary and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Dr. Lowry came to MoMA as a renowned specialist in Islamic art, and has lectured and written extensively in support of contemporary art and artists and the role of museums in society. Recent publications include Designing the New Museum of Modern Art (2004), Oil and Sugar: Contemporary Art and Islamic Culture (2009) and The Museum of Modern Art in This Century (2009). He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the steering committee for the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, and a resident member of the American Philosophical Society. In 2004 the French Government honored Dr. Lowry with the title of Officier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

Ram Rahman is a photographer, curator, activist, and co-founder of SAHMAT, a Delhi-based collective of artists and scholars dedicated to promoting cultural pluralism and secularism in India. After earning a BA in physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he went on to study graphic design at the Yale University School of Art. Working in both color and black-and-white, Rahman is known for his street photographs of India and his environmental portraits of artists and intellectuals. His photographs have been exhibited in Canada, Europe, India, and the US. His co-curated exhibition, with Jessica Moss, “The Sahmat Collective: Art and Activism in India since 1989,” at the Smart Museum of Art in Chicago, was honored by the 2014 Forbes Art Award for an Exhibition of Indian art curated on an international stage. His most recent publication is Sunil Janah: Photographs 1940-1960 (2014). Rahman is involved in Project 365 which seeks to photograph and preserve glimpses of the ancient Indian culture and lifestyle, focusing on the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu. He is interested in encouraging public art projects so as to take art to the masses, especially in the rural areas. It is part of Rahman’s larger ambition to use photographs as historical documents and develop a visual archiving culture in India.

Time: 6:15pm – 8:00pm
Location: Julius S. Held Lecture Hall, 3rd floor, Barnard Hall
Entrance to Barnard College at 117th Street and Broadway
Map and directions to Morningside Campus and Barnard College