Habib Rahman was born in 1915 in Kolkata, Bengal in Undivided India. He was an engineer, musician and photographer and played a pivotal role in the architectural landscape of the country in the early decades after India’s independence. He trained at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1940s under Lawrence Anderson, William Wurster and Walter Gropius. On his return to India, In 1946, he brought the design approach of architecture’s new International Style with him. Beginning with his design for Rabindra Bhavan in 1961, Rahman began to develop a distinct design style that fused a Bauhaus approach with a contemporary India idiom. Over the years Rahman created a regional modernist approach, visible in his designs for a number of buildings including the Lalit Kala Akademi building, the University Grants Commission office and several low-cost housing blocks under the Public Works Department. His concern with aesthetics, as much as utility, elevated his photographs of buildings(usually his own) from mere historical documents into fine-art architectural photography. His photographs of the modern buildings he designed are infused with his own extensive knowledge of the style of photographic modernism. Rahman often photographed from unexpected angles in order to produce a sort of disorienting mesh of lines. Rahman’s Photographs, both in their visual mode and the buildings they capture, have come to represent the glories of Indian Postcolonial modernism at the moment at which it was being produced and defined. He was married to Indrani Rahman, a classical dancer of international fame and their son Ram Rahman, also became a distinguished photographer, documenting Delhi’s society, its streets and architecture. Habib Rahman passed away in Delhi in 1995 and his son Ram Rahman manages the Habib Rahman Archives.