Raghu Rai, the ringside historian who changed news photography forever
A show brings together Rai’s works spanning five decades — from photographs of street life in Calcutta in the 1970s and 1980s to the portraits of Indira Gandhi and Mother Teresa
A man loitering along a Calcutta street in the late 1970s with his friend reaches out to naughtily pinch the cheeks of a hijra (transgender), who is posing for Raghu Rai’s camera. It is a typically dirty Calcutta street, and there is neither purpose nor hope reflected anywhere in that frame. Yet there is a bit of humour and a snatch of desolate purposeless and maybe unfulfilled lives.
Photographing street life in Calcutta in the 1970s and 1980s is where Raghu Rai, while working for The Statesman, perfected much of his craft. In each frame, there is some irony, pathos or the starkness of poverty and drudgery of everyday life, and also the lively warmth of the overflowing Calcutta street. In one such photograph, a street performer is somersaulting in front of a large crowd in the Calcutta maidan and positioned in a straight line with the airborne artiste is the Shaheed Minar, as if to contrast the huge gap between permanence of the Minar and the flippant nature of a street performer’s dangerous life.
The magic of the everyday
These photographs form part of a retrospective of Raghu Rai, titled ‘A Thousand Lives: Photographs, 1965-2005,’ on view at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi till March. It is a monumental mounting of photographs, showcasing the lifetime work of India’s most well-known photographer, who changed news photography, captured a million moments of the life of the country as it emerged from chaos to some sort of order, for half a century. The show leaves us wondering at this ringside historian’s amazing patience, persistence and devotion to his craft.
In each frame, there is some irony, pathos, or the starkness of poverty and drudgery of everyday life.
The street, its walls (one section is titled ‘The Wall’), the banks of the Hooghly, the banks of the Yamuna and the outskirts of Delhi, the office room of prime ministers, the political stage, the police lathicharge — Rai was everywhere trying not just to capture the moment for us. Everywhere, we see an effort to elevate his art with that painstaking effort. To wait a while longer for some magic to happen. “Even a breeze blowing, what it does to you and the entire space around you. That is what is magical about ongoing everyday life,” Rai writes in the introduction to one section.
From street photography to the solemn occasions of prime ministerial grandeur, Rai was ready with his camera to freeze frames on a magical moment. Those like this writer, who had the privilege of working with him, know how much he craved and tried to elevate a simple occasion or low life to high art. Rai didn’t see the world like we did. He saw beyond the immediate and the nearby, and when he lifted the camera to his eyes, we could make out that he had seen something we didn’t or couldn’t. His vision was always wide-angle.
Even those who became his subjects put on their best pose for him in a lonely street. There is one photo of a poor sari-clad girl carrying a bundle on her head and a cigarette simmering on her fingertips. She doesn’t seem to have any larger purpose. But in front of Rai’s camera, she strikes a pose that is devastating in all its pure happiness, with a smile bearing many meanings just breaking out. As if she was doing us all a favour by creating that extraordinary moment while carrying on her ordinary purposeless life. “Life’s longing for itself — that is what I feel my photographs should reflect,” Rai writes. How true.
Rai developed notions of divinity while photographing Mother Teresa and the Dalai Lama.
Portraits of power, and glimpses of divinity
The profiles he shot form part of our understanding and estimate of the great people who shaped our lives. Rai’s unrestrained access to Indira Gandhi, just like Homai Vyarawalla’s access to Jawarharlal Nehru, has given us a view of a different time in our history where trust, understanding, respect and admiration was part of political life, unlike today. Rai photographed Indira Gandhi almost every other day since 1967: “When I started capturing moments of her political and personal life, I realised I wanted to document for future generations the aura of her power and elegance.”
Indira Gandhi, too, seems to have realised the importance of photographs in building up a legacy and firming up her place in the collective consciousness of the country. Access makes all the difference to a news photographer. It is only then that a photographer shows intimacy and distance at the same time. The Indira Gandhi photographs are classic examples of this. In many photos, the prime minister is unaware of the chronicler in front of her. That is how history is made.
Patience always pays, especially for a photographer for whom everything occurs in a flash, be it the crackle of gunfire, the thud of a big fall, the deceptive laughter of a political leader. That readiness is important and Rai failed hardly ever. But even when he had all the time, for portraits, for instance, he transformed the moment. The Mother Teresa and the earlier Dalai Lama portraits with which we are familiar are examples. It is here that Rai developed notions of divinity. He believed that they were true revelations of the divine or god itself.
Rai photographed Indira Gandhi almost every other day since 1967. All photos: Raghu Rai
“I went to see her (Mother Teresa) last Sunday and as she appeared, she looked drenched in His glory, glowing in a pure light around her. I had my Darshan of Him as well through her.” The curators of the show, Roobina Karode and Devika Daulet Singh, too endorse this. “Spirituality is an intrinsic and essential part of Rai’s life and practice,” they write.
The transformation of desire
In a larger sense, it can be said that Rai chronicled the democratization of the country as it grew and learnt and protested and created and destroyed and killed and redeemed. That is a photographer’s job. The historian comes much later, with the advantage of hindsight and the weight of perspective.
Photography is a difficult art. It was more so during the days when Rai worked, when the film had to be developed in the dark room and light and shadow had to be adjusted while developing the film and then printing it. The interplay of light and shadow had to be watched during shooting itself when even a stray bit of light streaming in from a cleft in the window could make all the difference.
American political photographer Larry Fink, who photographed the Kennedy and Johnson era and who died late last year, said about his art: “Photography, for me, is the transformation of desire.” It could be Rai’s theme, too. It can be safely said that Rai stood strong and patient with a roving eye for beauty, as an amazing ringside chronicler to whom we have to be grateful.