Passing of an iconic photographer.

[Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi]

The first instinct, when one came face-to-face with this lean, long-limbed artist, was to meet his gaze. Because Raghu Rai’s eyes carried entire histories within them. For decades, they had recorded the turbulence of our restless India: the Bangladesh War, the assassination of Indira Gandhi and the violence that followed, the Bhopal Gas Tragedy, Operation Blue Star. Yet that gaze would linger just as sensitively on more serene versions of India where, he would suggest, nothing really changes. Some of his most enduring work outside breaking news came in extended photo essays for India Today magazine in the 1980s–including the heart-touching feature on a sarus crane living with a human family in a village in Madhya Pradesh.

Now that gaze is gone. Raghu Rai died on Saturday (26 April), aged 83, following a cancer-related illness.

Born in Jhang village in pre-Partition Punjab in 1942, Rai’s six-decade journey through photography is as extensive as the subcontinent he chronicled. His archive, running into hundreds of thousands of images, began almost by accident: a photograph of a gadha (donkey!) near Rohtak, clicked with his brother’s camera in the mid-1960s and published in The Times of London. He was 25 (and he was originally a “trained civil engineer”!). From that unassuming beginning emerged a body of work that would come to define how contemporary India sees itself, and how it is seen by the world.

In retrospect, Rai’s rise feels inevitable, though the journey must have involved disappointments and despairs borne even by the most talented artists. Perhaps the decisive moment arrived in 1977, when Henri Cartier-Bresson—the master of the decisive moment—nominated him to the esteemed Magnum Photos. The recognition must have mattered deeply to Rai, who believed Cartier-Bresson’s work “gave us many possibilities and references.” Yet Rai never tried to imitate Cartier-Bresson, he once told The Delhi Walla. Nor did he expect his own admirers to imitate him. “Try to be what you are,” he would say.

Rai’s photographs carried that philosophy. Be they his hallowed portraits of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, or the tea stall conversations of Varanasi, each photo is stamped with Rai’s unique way of experiencing the world. The most mundane and the most beautiful tend to intersect powerfully in one abrupt moment, producing nothing less than total jadoo, almost like a magician’s sorcery. Take one of his most impressive pictures of the city where he lived, Delhi: that of a young bare-bodied boy diving into the waters of the centuries-old Agrasen ki Baoli step-well, with the modern towers of Connaught Place rising along the horizon. Photos like these feel like meditations on time, where the fleeting meets the eternal.

To tell the truth, many Indian photographers have brilliantly captured the country’s overwhelming colour and energy. Another Raghu (Raghubir Singh) comes readily to mind. But Rai’s portfolio has percolated most deeply into the Indian consciousness, existing as much outside galleries and coffee-table books as within them. Several of his photos have become so iconic that many of us have seen them multiple times without knowing they were his.

So vast is Rai’s oeuvre that it is possible that some more of his great work is still waiting to be discovered. For instance, during his major retrospective A Thousand Lives: Photographs from 1965–2005, held two years ago at Delhi’s Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, a wider audience finally got a chance to view Rai’s powerful but lesser-seen images of Jayaprakash Narayan and his followers.

In his later years, at his Mehrauli office in south Delhi, Rai would often be seen sifting through his archives, lifting a magnifying glass to old negatives as if peering directly into time itself. He would then appear like a seer of the past. The impression would be misleading. This man was constantly curious about the present. “A great moment is like death—you don’t know when it will appear in front of you,” he remarked one long-ago morning over breakfast at his residence, dressed in a kaftan-like cloak and a hat (he collected hats—see photo).

Although he began in the analogue era, Rai became an advocate of digital photography during an assignment in Mumbai in 2003 with his first digital camera, a 6-megapixel Nikon D100. “The purpose of photography is to capture the time we live in,” he would say, insisting he used technology to serve “what I experienced, not what I want to show.”

But to pester Rai about his way of seeing was a question that never truly interested him. “Bring your own flavour into the photos you click,” he would say. Life, he believed, is endless. Just as nature. There is no saturation point, he would insist. Somewhere in this endlessness, a magical moment is always emerging. Indeed, if you look closely enough, you might just spot Raghu Rai’s gaze. And then, you must at once press the camera button.

PS: The quoted remarks in the story are drawn from previous interactions with Raghu Rai.