Luncheon Party, Raghu Rai
At Rajnish Ashram, Raghu Rai
Duststorm in Rajasthan, Raghu Rai
Trying to not be gushy but sometimes I slip.
THE PRIM rooms of the National Gallery of Modern Art in Delhi are being prepared for the biggest Raghu Rai retrospective ever (March 18-April 18). Each room is stacked with giant prints of his work spanning five decades. Drills whine into walls. A dozen men walk about purposefully. Guards close doors on confused visitors who have shown up because the opening was prematurely announced. In one corner stands a black-and-white photograph of a baby donkey. It was this infant, with all the dolorous charm of its race, that ignited Rai’s lifelong romance with photography.
In his twenties, he had borrowed his brother’s camera on a whim and shot some pictures. The Times, London, bought the photo of the baby donkey. Rai had never considered photography as a career until then but this unexpected event put him on a course towards thousands of photographs and a dozen books. While working as a photojournalist, he says, he would “listen to what my editors told me, comprehend it and promptly forget it.” The accolades came thick and fast but he worried about ossifying. “My work in India Today was powerful, wonderfully composed and dramatic. I knew then, I had to quit and clear my head.”
Even those who have never gone to an art gallery would be familiar with at least one Raghu Rai photograph. Perhaps the Bhopal photos; perhaps those from Osho’s ashram, or that of his baby son’s fingers around his father’s hands. Rai continues to hate the idea of a signature style, one that can be spotted across crowded rooms. “When someone tells me, ‘I can always recognise your photographs’, I say, ‘Shit!’.”
The closest he will come to aphorisms about his own work is saying: “Every photograph needs to be several moments all living together.” At the Rencontres d’Arles Photography Festival last year, Rai had pronounced, “We photographers owe a lot to France and French photographers but in India, a moment in time is not enough.”
This, perhaps, is the trail of bread crumbs to follow while looking at the 200 photographs picked for the retrospective: overwhelming for those used to thin pickings in photography shows. One room, ready for the opening, seems calm. Until you see the thunderous skylines in several frames: monsoons in a village outside Delhi; dark clouds in Assam; dust-storms seem to fling around a group of men like so many tops in the desert. A closer look at one frame explains the first impression: flowering in the quiet foreground are a pair of old-fashioned black umbrellas.
“Digital photography — even cellphones have cameras — has made it easy. Everyone can take pictures. This is wonderful but photographers need to be more ambitious, ready to be confronted by the world. You need to hope and wait for that moment of comprehension. For darshan, to be able to see.”
Rai’s avuncular manner towards young photographers alternates with unalloyed irritation with those who borrow ideas unthinkingly from the West. “Shooting empty, urban landscapes does not make your work contemporary. To talk about globalisation, you still need to look at people, at details.”
In his work from the 1990s, hoardings and other advertising paraphernalia seem to dwarf people. Even from the short distance of a decade, these images look kindly, less frightening than today’s encounters. Next year, Rai releases an entire book of work on globalised India. He has squared his shoulders and shot even inside the malls he dislikes. He does not shirk from the meticulous and many of his images pay tribute to the energy required to do thankless tasks everyday: by workers, women, sadhus.
“I follow religion very keenly, any religion. Religious people, with their attention to ritual, have a different way of holding themselves. Have you heard of the saying ‘kan-kan mein bhagwan hai’? That bhagwan is not Ram or Christ. It’s about the life that lies in the details.” To observe his gestures, that move from the all-embracing to the thimbleful, is to see his ever-versatile eye.
WHAT PROJECTS is he looking forward to? “I want to shoot Indians in their own environments; frames with 60 different things happening in them; not staged portraits. Those are too easy.”
The recent blitz of shows come in for some sharp criticism. As much as Rai is troubled by ‘half-understood, poorly executed’ exhibitions of young photographers who have not yet come into their own, he is more upset by mature photographers who rest on their laurels and exhibit juvenilia.
“The art market boom has fuelled it. People know photo shows are cheaper. A big packet of prints arrive, you have your show, then put in a big packet and send it back. Even if a print gets slightly damaged, it does not cost you that much to have fresh, flawless prints created. This is not serious work. But I suppose we must start somewhere. As a people, we are visually illiterate. We need to, we will, slowly learn to look at photos. We’ll learn to see.”
Rai is nearly 70. Even if his celebrity did not precede him, even if his fame did not buy docile silence to his strictures, the storms brewing in his photographs would. They seduce you into drunken afternoons, rainshowers, fraught silences, the possibilities of orgie. They also ask you to get on with your life.
