New Delhi, April 26: Raghu Rai, one of India’s best known photographers who distilled the essence of an evolving India and its people through his lens, died at a private hospital here in the early hours of Sunday. He was 83.
“Dad was diagnosed with prostate cancer two years ago but he was cured. Then it spread to the stomach, that too was cured. Recently, the cancer spread to his brain and then there were age-related issues too,” Nitin Rai, photographer and Rai’s son, said.
He is survived by wife Gurmeet, son Nitin and daughters Lagan, Avani and Purvai.
Born on December 18, 1942, in Jhang, Punjab (now in Pakistan), Rai was qualified as a civil engineer and only took up photography at 23 before joining The Statesman newspaper as its chief photographer in 1966.
Life from that point onwards was anything but a blur. Over the next six decades, Rai’s lens froze for posterity fleeting moments with unmatched clarity, documenting a growing India’s socio-political landscape.
The prolific photographer, a protege of Henri Cartier-Bresson, shot some of the most significant events in Indian modern history, including the Bangladesh refugee crisis of 1972 and the Bhopal gas tragedy of 1984.
He recorded India’s social, political and spiritual shades in his portraits of leading figures, including Indira Gandhi, the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa, Satyajit Ray, Hariprasad Chaurasia and Bismillah Khan, which offered hitherto unknown perspectives into their lives.
More than what made news on a daily basis, Rai’s camera caught the ordinary, the everyperson, with equal, if not more, sensibility and sensitivity. The mundane was made extraordinary, often in black and white, as if trying to soften the edges of life’s ruggedness. (PTI)
