Raghu Rai, the man who stood as a byword for modern Indian photography is no more. He was 83. Rai had found his seat among the world famous photographers like Henri Cartier Bresson, Sebastiao Salgado, Walker Evans and so on in the hall of fame.
Perhaps, Rai was the last Indian photographer who did not have to call himself a photography artist. His works belonged to the genre of documentary photography with an almost neutral gaze. Those frames were aesthetically polished and showed the classic quality of analogue photography.
Rai never had to call himself an artist like Dayanita Singh or Ram Rahman or Parthiv Shah or Samar Jodha mainly because he was absolutely sure about the autonomy of photography as a medium and art form. He belonged to the Indian photography tradition set by Homai Vyarawala, Kulwant Rai and Kishore Parikh. They followed a kind of ruthless objectivity in their photography.
Post Rai, Indian photographers had to vie with the visual artists who used photography as a part of their creative mediums. They did not want to let it go and yield the field totally to the visual artists who co-opted this medium. Technology and artistic concerns were changing too fast by late 1990s and it was difficult to maintain pure objectivity.
Polarisation of ideology and aesthetics caused the Indian photographers to lean towards the resistant forms of photographic production and chose to perspectivize images based on ideological affiliations. With memory projects and social documentation, photography became a medium of story telling. The condensed history within the documentary images created by Rai and his ilk, in the hands of later photography artists became images picked out from a longer narrative.
Rai followed the idea of ‘decisive moment’ as forwarded by Cartier Bresson. It was a moment which was the mother of all other moments preceded and succeeded it. This moment of non-landing, a moment that made everyone wonder about its cause and effect, was important for Rai rather than the story that an image could tell. Rai chose to find the most poignant moment from the incidents that unfurled before him.
Rai was the M F Husain of photography. Husain painted the immediate and happening people and moments thereby making the painting a part of the history that had been visually registered. Rai too clicked the happenings and people. If one animates Rai’s pictures they would impart the feel of another Ray’s movies.
While the post liberal, ideologically driven photography artists in India worked on the size of the prints as printers started grew in size and scope, Rai chose to remain within a intimate scale; a 3 by 2 scale, big enough yet humane.
Rai stood tall in stature literally and metaphorically. He belonged to the last generation of photographers who wore kurta and shawl during winters. He will be remembered through and for his wonderful black and white works, for the photo books that he and his first wife Usha Rai co-produced and for being a gentle presence in the cultural landscape of India.
