India has lost one of its most consequential chroniclers. Raghu Rai, the photojournalist who spent six decades turning the streets, tragedies, and quiet intimacies of this country into permanent visual records, passed away at the age of 83, his family shared on his Instagram profile on Sunday.
Born on December 18, 1942, at Jhang in Punjab — now in Pakistan — Rai stumbled into photography almost accidentally, borrowing a camera from his elder brother S Paul in the 1960s. That accident became a career that would take him to Magnum Photos, to the front pages of Time, Life, and The New Yorker magazines, and to the heart of India’s most defining moments — the Bangladesh Liberation War, the Bhopal gas tragedy, the quiet grandeur of the Ganga ghats.
But it was not merely what he photographed that set him apart. It was how he thought about the act of photography itself.
Colour or not
“Colour photographs tend to lack seriousness. The colours are exaggerated; not real,” he said in a 2016 conversation with Hindustan Times at the Panchkula Art and Literary Festival.
He was asked how black-and-white photography remained relevant in an age of vivid digital colour.
He defined the choice of monochrome as not merely stylistic, but moral at some level. Colour, in his view, seduced the eye away from the truth at the centre of the frame. It distracted, he said.
Black and white, by contrast, demanded that both the photographer and the viewer do more work, and rewarded them for it.
“With black and white, one can create visual harmony,” he said, “In the sense that the visual noise and distortion in the picture come through like a dialogue.”
This was a view he returned to throughout his career. In interviews spanning decades, he consistently held that colour risked turning a photograph decorative, pulling the viewer’s attention toward surface rather than substance. Monochrome, he argued, stripped away that temptation.
“What takes away your heartbeat becomes your muse for the moment,” he told HT.
Trained on the unscripted
Rai was also deeply suspicious of staged photography, believing that genuine images emerged only in unguarded moments.
He saw photojournalism, his prime vocation as a photographer, as a responsibility.
“History can be written and rewritten. But photojournalism is a rough draft of history, giving pucca proof, evidence of who we are and where we came from,” he told HT.
“The origin of an image has to come from the immediacy and the magic that is unfolding for just now,” Rai said in another interview. “It won’t be repeated.”
Legacy in black and white
Raghu Rai produced more than 18 books, founded the Raghu Rai Centre for Photography in Haryana in 2016, and was honoured with the Padma Shri and the Lucie Foundation’s Master of Photojournalism awards.
His photographs of Mother Teresa, Indira Gandhi, the Dalai Lama, and the anonymous millions of India’s streets are seen as a visual record of a nation in constant, restless motion.
