Listen to this article:

The well known news photographer Raghu Rai, who could see beauty in every street corner, draw out divinity and the comic in equal measure from a human face and who gave us many unforgettable pictures by which we understood India, died in Delhi after a long fight with cancer on Sunday (April 26). He was 84. 

The camera in his hand, mostly a Nikon, was like a painter’s brush. Like any artist, he could see what the regular eye could not and he got his best pictures when he walked the streets of Kolkata and Delhi. He was a moving algorithm of art and beauty. To see him with the camera was to see an animated man moving helter skelter, as if he was worried that around the corner was something waiting to be captured.

This was how he shot one of the most beautiful pictures out of the chaos of Chandni Chowk, “Evening prayer, Jama Masjid 1982”. He was walking down a staircase in the crowded Chandni Chowk when he saw a lady kneeling down in prayer as the fading evening light cast a halo of light around here through the open door of a small room. In the background, the Jama Masjid loomed like a sentinel and loitering clouds gave the photo a holy feel. 

“Rai was the M.F. Husain of photography. Husain painted the immediate…thereby making the painting a part of the history that has been visually registered… If one animates Rai’s pictures they would impart the feel of another of Ray’s movies,” Johny M.L., senior art curator, wrote on Facebook.

Streets were his playground

Some of Rai’s best street photos came from Chandni Chowk, be it the labourers pushing the cart or the many struggles of the people who led subhuman lives. In the early part of his career, the street was Rai’s playfield and he mastered the art in Kolkata, where he worked for the Statesman. 

It was from the street that he shot the picture of a municipal worker sweeping away election posters. Indira Gandhi’s face could be seen staring helplessly from one of those posters. 

In another photograph from Kolkata, where a transgender person (hijra) was posing for him, another man can be seen passing by, stretching out to pinch the cheeks of the poseur. There was humour, sadness and pathos in most of his frames.

It would........

© The Wire