Raghu Rai, perhaps the most famous photographer of India, breathed his last in the wee hours of April 26 at the age of 84. When his beloved country was sleeping, Rai closed his eyes for the last time in a hospital in New Delhi. He was battling prostate cancer for more than two years. Rai's cremation will be held at 4pm today at Lodhi Road Cremation Ground.
In 1971, Raghu Rai was nominated to the prestigious international photographic cooperative Magnum Photos by legendary photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson.
Rai documented major historical milestones, including the Bangladesh refugee crisis, the liberation war, and the tragic 1984 Bhopal gas disaster. He also captured intimate, defining photographs of prominent global and spiritual figures, most notably Mother Teresa and the Dalai Lama.
Rai's family confirmed the news on his Instagram profile. With his demise, the curtain falls on a life that discovered the soul of India through the camera, coming up with some of the images that will be cherished for generations and leave a pictorial representation of the incredible India he loved so dearly.
Rai was born on December 18, 1942, in a village in Punjab, which is now within the boundaries of Pakistan. He was the youngest of four children, and the credit for initiating a young Rai into photography goes to his brother Sharampal Chowdhry, who was professionally known as S Paul. Paul gave Raghu his first camera and Raghu's third eye was born.
Raghu Rai began clicking in the early sixties. By 1965, he joined The Statesman in New Delhi as its chief photographer. Rai was a prolific photographer. By 1971, he took part in an exhibition in Paris. The most famous photographer till date, the French master Henri Cartier-Bresson saw and liked his work.
Cartier-Bresson took such an interest in his work that he pushed Rai to join Magnum Photos in 1977. The seventies were a decade of turmoil -- the war in East Pakistan and the birth of Bangladesh and the huge flow of refugees in India all producing a visual narrative that Rai captured with the passion of an evangelist and the eyes of an artist. These events cemented his position in the global league.
His career took him from The Statesman to Sunday magazine and then to India Today. By then, Rai had become an institution. He authored close to 20 books and some of the best pictures are captured in Delhi, The Sikhs, Calcutta, Khajuraho, Taj Mahal, Tibet in Exile, India and Mother Teresa. One of his best series was on the Bhopal disaster and its ramifications for the gas victims.
Rai was awarded the Padmashree in 1971. Rai pictures have been exhibited in almost all major cities of the world, including London, Paris, New York, Hamburg, Prague, Tokyo, Zurich and Sydney. There was not a prominent magazine which did not print his photographs and the list includes names such as Time, Life, Geo, The New York Times, The Sunday Times, Newsweek, The Independent and The New Yorker.
Photojournalist, photographer, a storyteller with light, inaugurator of photographic artistry and a consummate lover of anything on the other side of the camera, Raghu Rai was perhaps to photography what Jim Corbett was to hunting -- a man with a deeply passionate and sensitive soul.
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