"The Photographs I Love" 17—Raghu Rai

“I am a pilgrim. I travel all over the country with complete faith.
India, for me, is the whole world.
I would need ten lifetimes to complete something on my country
but unfortunately I have only one.
One thing is certain, I'm getting more and more to the heart of things now.”
(Raghu Rai) 

Raghu Rai. Mumbai, 2004

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The time has come to talk about an Indian photographer.

We have been to Japan, China, Bangladesh, now we arrive in the village of Jhang, Punjab, in British India (now in Pakistan), where Raghunath Rai Chowdhry, known as Raghu Rai, was born in 1942, the youngest of four children.

Rai began photographing in 1965 and a year later he joined the staff of “The Statesman”, a New Delhi publication. In 1976 he left the newspaper and became a freelance photographer.

The following year, thanks to Henri Cartier-Bresson, who had fallen in love with his photographs exhibited in Paris in 1971, he joined the Magnum agency, of which he still belongs.

From 1982 to 1992, Rai was the director of photography for “India Today” and was part of the jury for the World Press Photo from 1990 to 1997.

 

Raghu Rai

I have already written about photography in India before, and the list of photographers who have told it in images is as long as the Ganges.

It could be said that every great photographer has been at least once in his life in India.

Memorable are the shots of McCurry, Abbas, Mary Ellen Mark, Marc Riboud or Cartier-Bresson himself, not to mention the Indian photographers themselves, first of all for fame, immediately after Rai, Raghubir Singh.

What’s certain is that, for me, India in black and white cannot be the same as color.

This is a theme that repeats itself indefinitely and loses its meaning, reducing itself to pure personal taste. Even if it's painful for me to see Abbas' beautiful photos of Hinduism in black and white, one cannot protest the choice of the photographers. I think about this as Raghubir Singh, according to whom India can only be represented in color.

There are places or events that I can't see differently from the color that expresses them, and I'm not just talking about the Holi festival.

The Indian subcontinent is the land of color.

As Rosa Carnevale writes in the beautiful introduction “At the heart of India”, about Rai:

“India is the land of colors. There is no other place in the world where you just need to turn your head and look around to see an infinity of different chromatic tones and shades. No other country in which colors have even become a codified symbolic language known by all. Deciphering it at first glance is part of a wealth of skills that every Indian acquires from birth. Women's saris or men's dhotis are able to tell us with their colors a lot about who wears them: caste of belonging, marital status, religion. Each caste has a varna (color).”

 

Raghu Rai. “A Bazar Scene”. Old Delhi, 2006

Rai himself begins to photograph in black and white. As was the practice in the 1970s. Then he will come to the color, but without ever betting on a single decision, like his compatriot Singh. Indeed, his ideas are clear on the subject:

“I think you can use any lens, decide between color or black and white, but what is captured and shared, if it has honesty and a certain amount of magic, can be considered good enough as far as I'm concerned. And, frankly, the discussion between the supremacy of color over black and white I think is a useless debate. Some situations blend very well with black and white, others can use a nice color look instead. On the one hand, color has its strength and energy. But, on the other hand, when you put a black and white filter on certain frames, the noise of the colors silences. We can talk about it endlessly and with various kinds of arguments in favor of one or the other solution.”

It’s flawless. Then each of us chooses which aspect we like best about a photographer and which shots of him.

I, of course, love the photographs of him overflowing with color.

 

Raghu Rai has a particular characteristic, moreover. Unlike the vast majority of the great masters of Photography, not only of the Magnum, he has almost always photographed only his land. His main books are all about India.

The idea of the photographer who travels the world telling every lost corner loses its meaning with Rai. He is the photographer of India.

 

Lately I was lucky enough to get hold of a very rare book of his entitled “Bangladesh – The price of Freedom”, reprinted in 2019 with the archive of photographs found after 40 years, on the exodus of the Bangladeshi people during the liberation war by the Pakistan Army.

He was one of the few photographers on the border, in 1971, to document the exodus to India until the final victory. A book edited together with his friend Shahidul Alam.

Wonderful book but always on the border.

 

Raghu Rai. Bangladesh refugee camp, 1971

But this aspect of his strong connection to his land does not take anything away, for me, from his value as a photographer. Rather.

No one like him is able to introduce us to this immense country.

 

Recently I happened to speak with both a friend from Senegal and with other friends from Kerala, and they both expressed the disappointment and annoyance at how Africa and India were very often represented in photographs.

Slums, dirty children with snot noses, beggars or bodies as thin as skeletons.

Even on television or in the movies, the European orphan is dull but always well dressed, the African or Indian one with tattered clothes and dirty hair.

I can imagine their level of impatience and anger towards this monotonous vision of truly immense and countless nations.

After all, when traveling for short periods, the eyes often rely on what appears more on the surface, with the laziness to look for something other than what we already know because we have seen it thousands of times.

We carry the stereotype of the white ruler over poor and dirty black from colonialism, and it is not as archived – visually – as we delude ourselves to believe.

The poverty and misery of the streets of Indian megalopolises, as I have been told or read by the Europeans who have been there, is thrown into your face, until you cry.

Yes, that might be true, but it's also what we just see, because having those feelings of compassion makes us feel better, good, and damn “different and superior.”

Our distance confirms us more than actually making us com-passion, and therefore becoming flesh of the same flesh, on pain of the same pain.

 

It could be called the exoticism of the soul, which translates into stereotypical photography when it comes to the eyes.

Raghu Rai is, instead, at his home.

There is no “exoticism” or “East”, with which the West has built its identity by contrast, as Edward Said wrote in 1978. For him it means crossing the streets of India and narrating its many identities.

The purpose of photography, for Rai, is to “build a photographic history of our time”. The fundamental quality is living in the present moment. Being among the people.

Telling the great events, such as the environmental disaster of Bophal in 1984 that made him famous, or the great characters, from Mother Teresa of Calcutta to the Dalai Lama, to the variegated humanity that lives and survives in the cities and villages,

He explains it himself, about Salgado:

“I could not photograph outside India, outside a world I know. Unlike Salgado, for example. Once I asked him, ‘But how do you travel a lot?’; and he replied: ‘Wherever I go, I bring my home inside me.’ I can not; I have to feel like I am in a place, belonging to that world, to try to capture some truth, some human emotion, and this world is India.”

 

Raghu Rai. “Dusk Time at Mahabalipuram”. India, 1996

For all this, the choice of my favorite photographer falls on this one taken in Mumbai in 2004.

Yes, it's in a slum. Yet another photo of a slum in Mumbai.

But what is different about it? There are 14 people in this photo teeming with life and, apart from three of them with faces that cannot be seen, all the others smile, if they do not laugh completely open-mouthed, like the lady sitting in the center who seems to be the fulcrum of the whole image.

The rest are winking glances among the girls, lines of glances and smiles among the young women, the friendly smile of the only man on the left, who perhaps knows of the photographer's presence and smiles out of shyness.

This photograph is a micro-world, as photos in the slums often are.

But what transpires, with its multiple shades of color, is a sense of joy, fun – as if to say that not because people live in a shantytown have to cry, be broken or desperate. This is usually what we look for as confirmation when we see these kinds of photographs.

Still, it is enough to spend more time in those places; it is not as easy as for those who live there like Rai (who becomes a fundamental faithful witness), but the only way is to try to see things as they are, without adding to them what “must be according to our point of view”.

Raghu Rai, in this photo, shows it in a clear and noisy way: there are normal, cheerful families who live their lives in the most natural way possible.

An idea that, in my small way, I tried to carry on with my photographs in the slums of Jakarta, where I spent some time, always trying to avoid – while not keeping silent about the difficulties – a certain type of storytelling that hurts people themselves more who lives there other than those who look at those photos; even if the damage done to the viewer without ever having been there is considerable because it only confirms those stereotypes hated by those who come from those lands.

 

Stefano Romano. Plumpang. Jakarta – November 2017

Stefano Romano. Luar Batang. Jakarta – July 2016

That's why I chose this photograph by Raghu Rai, for its cheerful vitality, for its arrogance of color. And because it is absolutely true, taken by those who share heart, tears and smiles with these people.

What a lesson for all lovers of the exotic.

Especially when the search for the exotic takes place in places where people struggle to survive, day after day.

“For me the camera is a tool for learning. 

It is enough to look through it to reach a sort of recollection; 

this is the moment when you can penetrate and discover the invisible – the unknown. You can understand both yourself and the world.” 

(Raghu Rai) 

Raghu Rai. “Churchgate Railway Station”. Mumbai, 1995

• “The Photographs I Love” 16 — Pinkhassov 
• “The Photographs I Love” 15 — Fan Ho 

To see his photos: Raghu Rai Foundation 
Raghu Rai: “Bangladesh - The price of Freedom” (Niyogi Books, 2019)
Raghu Rai: “My India” (Contrasto – Corriere della Sera, 2019)

 

Italian version