Raghu Rai: The Photographer Who Belonged to the Frame

“I like being amongst my own people; I merge with them; I don’t wear stylish clothes; I have one camera with zoom lens so I do not alarm people; no-one says ‘here comes the photographer’.”

This was how Raghu Rai described his way of working, and it was the key to everything. For more than six decades, he moved through India not as an observer from the outside, but as someone who belonged to it. He died in Delhi on Sunday, at the age of 83, leaving behind a body of work that amounts to the most sustained and serious visual record of modern India ever made.

The Man Behind the Lens

Born on 18 December 1942 in Jhang, Punjab, a village that now falls within Pakistan, the youngest of four children, he was trained initially as a civil engineer. It was his elder brother, the photographer S. Paul, who first placed a camera in his hands in 1962. Rai joined The Statesman in New Delhi as photographer.

A photograph of a donkey in a Haryana village, published in The Times of London, set him on a course that would reshape visual storytelling in India. From there, he went on to document some of the most consequential moments in the nation’s history. Like the Bangladesh Liberation War, the Emergency, the gathering storm in Punjab before Operation Blue Star, the spiritual and the political woven together through a single, restless eye.

In 1977, he became the first Indian photographer invited to join Magnum Photos, nominated by Henri Cartier-Bresson. He had already received the Padma Shri in 1972. Over subsequent decades, his essays appeared in Time, Life, The New York Times, Newsweek, and The New Yorker. He produced more than 18 books, served three times on the jury of the World Press Photo, and exhibited in London, Paris, New York, Tokyo, and Sydney.

He photographed Indira Gandhi with an intimacy few journalists were afforded. He spent sustained time with Mother Teresa in Calcutta. He was present at Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s ashram in the spring of 1968 when The Beatles arrived. His portraits reached for something beneath the surface, what he described as the “silence of death”.

Unlike many Magnum photographers who used their membership as a passport to the world, Rai remained committed to India, to its faces, its light, its contradictions, its spiritual textures. He immersed himself in the life of anonymous, ordinary people and paid homage to the ever-changing diversity of the subcontinent.

Bhopal: The Work That Could Not Be Forgotten

If there is a single body of work by which Rai will be remembered by those who did not grow up with his images of everyday Indian life, it is his documentation of the Bhopal gas tragedy, arguably the most important sustained act of witness in the history of Indian photography.

On the night of 2–3 December 1984, the Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal leaked methyl isocyanate gas into a sleeping city. Thousands died overnight and hundreds of thousands were injured. The scale of the disaster was almost impossible to comprehend, let alone photograph.

Rai was there to cover it as a photojournalist did not leave when the immediate story faded from front pages, as most did. He returned, again and again, compelled by what he had witnessed, by the survivors. For Greenpeace, he completed a long-form documentary project on the disaster and its ongoing consequences. The work resulted in a book titled Exposure: A Corporate Crime and three exhibitions that toured Europe, America, India, and South-East Asia.

A Life in Full

In his final decades, Rai embraced the digital transition with the same decisiveness that had defined his entire career. In 2003, on assignment for Geo magazine in Bombay, he picked up a digital camera and, as he put it, never looked back.

In 2017, his daughter Avani accompanied him on a trip to Kashmir. The resulting documentary, Raghu Rai: An Unframed Portrait, executive-produced by Anurag Kashyap, offered an intimate window into a life spent in relentless pursuit of the image, a father and daughter trying to understand each other through the work that had always come first.

He is survived by his wife Gurmeet, his son Nitin, and his daughters Lagan, Avani, and Purvai. His son Nitin, also a photographer.