Bombay Once
Reading Photographs — Monthly Series
Reading Photographs — Monthly Series
One image. Close looking. Open questions.
This month: Raghubir Singh — A family, Kamathipura, Bombay, 1977
I’m not interested in explaining this photograph or fixing its meaning. Instead, I want to stay with it—to look slowly at what’s present, what’s hinted at, and what the frame withholds. Like most photographs that endure, this one doesn’t offer answers easily. It asks for time.
I saw this photograph last Sunday at Jhaveri Contemporary in Mumbai, from the exhibition “Raghubir Singh: Bombay”. Of all the images in the show, this one stayed with me the longest.
What draws me in is how much life it holds without announcing itself. A resting body. A child being held. A woman standing in thought. Another turned away in the middle of work. Painted figures on the wall. Domestic life, exhaustion, tenderness, proximity all sharing the same frame.
It feels like a kind of Bombay I remember, or think I remember. Not just visually, but emotionally. A city of closeness. Of lives unfolding in public and private at once. A time that now feels distant.
What Raghubir Singh does so beautifully is make the everyday feel layered without making it dramatic. The colors, the gestures, the arrangement of bodies and walls everything seems ordinary at first. But the longer I look, the more the photograph opens up.
I’m not interested in fixing its meaning. Only in staying with it for a while.
Maybe that is what I responded to most: not just the scene itself, but the way it carries memory, intimacy, and the texture of a city that is always changing.
I’d be curious to know what you notice if you spend a little time with this photograph.
There’s no right reading—only what stays with you.
First impression: This looks like a painting. The colours seemed to come alive in a now forgotten way. Second: I was trying to figure out where it was shot, whether that place exists today, and what the paintings on the wall were about. And then the people, their faces, their possible relationships, etc,
A frame of longing, a slower pace of life, where a lot more things were happening in the public realm. You can still find such pockets of life in the suburbs and the many chawls of Mumbai but the city is changing.
I love the hand painted woman as well. Great choice