This turned out to be unsuccessful, but by this time, he had started to take photographs. In Calcutta, Singh met the historian R. P. Gupta, who later contributed text for his first book "Ganges" (1974). Singh was gradually introduced to a circle of city artists who deeply influenced his later work, especially the realism of filmmaker Satyajit Ray, who later designed the cover of his first book and wrote the introduction to his Rajasthan book. This also set a precedent for literary input in his future books, as in the coming years the writer V. S. Naipaul conducted a dialogue with him for the preface to his book "Bombay" (1994), while R. K. Narayan wrote the introduction to "Tamil Nadu" (1997). By the mid-1960s, Life Magazine had published eight pages of his photographs about student unrest. He later moved to Hong Kong and started doing photo features for "National Geographic Magazine, The New York Times"... After a decade of travelling along the Ganges, Singh published his first book "Ganges" in 1974, with an introduction by Eric Newby. Though his early work was inspired by Henri Cartier-Bresson's documentary-style photographs of India, he chose colour as his medium, responding to the vivid colours of India, and over time adapted western techniques to Indian aesthetics. In the 1970s, Singh moved to Paris and over the following three decades, through rigorous training and exposure, he created a series of portfolios of colour photography on India. His style was influenced by Mughal painting and Rajasthani miniature paintings, whose individual sections maintain their autonomy within the overall frame. In his early work, Singh focused on the geographic and social anatomy of cities and regions in India. His work on Bombay in the early 1990s marks a turning point in his stylistic development. Singh published over 14 books. In the last of these, "A Way into India" (2002), published posthumously, the Ambassador car in which he travelled on all his journeys across Indian since 1957 becomes a camera obscura. Singh uses its doors and windshield to frame and divide his photographs. In the accompanying text, John Baldessari compares Singh to Orson Welles for his juxtaposition of near and far and to Mondrian for his fragmentation of space. In addition to his photographic work, Singh taught in New York at the School of Visual Arts, Columbia University and Cooper Union. In 1972, he married Anne de Henning, also a photographer, and the couple had a daughter, Devika Singh.