Raghubir Singh was a renowned Indian photographer known for his influential work in color street photography. He started his career as a photojournalist for The New York Times and National Geographic, documenting India’s urban and rural transformations of the 1970s-1990s. Later, his work took the form of monographs. Despite living in New York and Paris, and teaching at the School of Visual Arts, Columbia University, and Cooper Union, Singh always returned to India to make his images.

His notable publications include "Ganges" (1974), "The Rajasthan" (1978), and "Bombay: Gateway of India" (1994). His “Kerala (1986)” series is a pictorial study of a region at the southwestern tip of India on the Malabar Coast. Singh visited Kerala for the first time as an American journalist to document the first major success of the Communist Party in a democratic country. It held Singh’s interest because its geography, art, and caste system differ vastly from the India he knew growing up.