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Raghu Rai is gone. For over six decades he was the closest thing Indian photography had to a conscience, a man who documented this country’s life, its contradictions, its grief and its joy – all with a patience and an honesty that nobody has quite matched. The tributes will come and they should. The retrospectives will follow. But before the world settles into that familiar business, I want to say something about what he actually was beyond all of it. 

Not the names he photographed, not the disasters he bore witness to, not the decades of work being catalogued everywhere you look today. I want to talk about the kind of maker he was. Because that is the part that matters most right now, when picture making has never been more available to everyone and simultaneously never felt more hollow.

Raghu had junoon. That word exists in Hindi, Urdu and Punjabi, and it does not translate cleanly into English because English has no single word for the particular madness that keeps you going regardless of what the world thinks of what you are doing. It is not passion – that’s too soft. It is not obsession, too clinical. The closest English gets is persistence, but even that is too tame. 

Persistence suggests a choice. Junoon is not a choice. It is that stubborn internal fire that keeps burning even when there is no obvious reason for it to. Rai would arrive somewhere without a predetermined picture in his head. No agenda. Just complete faith that if he was present with full attention, something real would be there. And it always was. Because junoon keeps you present enough to receive what is actually there rather than what you came looking for. That quality is almost gone from picture making today.

Here’s what happened. The mobile phone arrived and it was suddenly in everyone’s hands. And with it came the free frame. When film cost money and you had 36 exposures on a roll, every frame carried weight. You waited. You absorbed. There was a real conversation happening between you and the moment before you committed to it. The mobile phone removed all of that. Now we carpet bomb. We make 400 frames of something Raghu would have made four of, and we tell ourselves that somewhere in those four hundred is the truth. But the truth........

© The Wire