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SIGNPOSTS

Moments of honesty

Photos: Raghu Rai

Slices of history: Clockwise from top, Aborted foetuses, Bhopal Gas Tragedy; Lamas during prayers, Ladakh and Bazigars from Rajasthan, Delhi.

A few years ago, when I interviewed Raghu Rai for his opinion on Indian photography’s then newly acquired status as art and investment, the legendary photographer said, “Photography, no matter what the subject, will always present a slice of reality. The honesty of the medium far exceeds its artistic value.” And yet, it is Rai’s photographic work that continues to receive the maximum artistic tribute, the latest being a retrospective at the National Gallery of Modern Art.

“The Journey of a Moment in Time: Raghu Rai” is a retrospective show of photographs that span 40 years of the photographer’s momentous career. After a successful showing at the NGMA, Delhi, it has met with equal popularity in Mumbai where the date of the exhibit has been extended well into July. Ranging from his first photograph of a donkey to his poignant portraits of leading national figures, his showcase of Indian landscape and culture, and his haunting records of the Bhopal tragedy, Rai’s work is a mosaic of India’s reality slices.

For a person who has witnessed the transition of the country first-hand, from the years of Partition to the days of economic optimism, Rai’s work captures beautifully the nation’s contradictions and conflicting moods, historic moments and colourful events, using a brilliant juxtaposition of contrasts. Today, Rai reiterates, “The purpose of photography is not just art but the documentation of the history of a country in transition.” And one moment, he says, is not enough to define this journey. “I want my photographs to have so much more than one moment.”

Rai’s own journey and career path are intertwined with the journey of India. Born in pre-Partition Pakistan, his tryst with photography began early, with a box camera, and turned into a passion in 1966 when one of his images was published in the London Times. As chief photographer of The Statesman, followed by collaborations with Magnum Photos, The Sunday and India Today, he gave us a body of work that is today a nation’s trajectory. Remarkably, much of the work exhibited at the NGMA has never been displayed or seen before.

What defines Rai’s work is the very quality that he admires in the medium — honesty. He believes that a photograph must not be well composed. Rather, it ought to be a “slice of happening”. In the documentary that is screened as part of the retrospective, he professes to shoot only in his home country, saying, “India means the whole world to me.” It is an emotion well represented in his work. Through Rai’s lens, we see a nation in transition, whether it is a metro train seen through a temple in Delhi, Mumbai airport seen from the Dharavi slums or daily wage labourers and ordinary folk gawking at a hoarding selling an international brand of shampoo in “Against The Hoarding, Salt Lake City, Kolkata – 2006”. He presents leading, almost hallowed, national figures in a human light as we are made privy to the many moods and faces of Indira Gandhi and Mother Teresa while they go about their daily lives. Similarly, some of the greatest exponents of Indian classical music are captured in both performance and in practice. Meanwhile, ordinary folk and surroundings are presented in an extraordinary light as in the case of “Woman At Work, Delhi – 1989”. Significantly, Rai’s own transition from black and white to colour photography in the 1980s and to digital technology in recent times reflects and enhances at the same time the contrasts of his subject country.

Rai’s stills are rarely, if ever, still. His pictures have motion and energy. And every image tells a story. When I ask Rai to share a memorable story related to his photographs, he says, “I like my pictures to speak for themselves. An image must have its own intensity. Talking about it takes away from the story that it is telling.”

We see humour well placed in photographs such as “Congress session, Tirupati – 1991”, “Mrs. Indira Gandhi with Congress Men – 1967” and “Wrestlers in an Akhara – 1988”. Rai chooses his frame and then within that space, waits “for a moment of energy”. His most energetic are perhaps the religious series — images from the Kumbh Mela, Durga Puja, Muharram and other important religious moments from across the country: Varanasi, Kolkata, Kanyakumari, Thiruvananthapuram, Ladakh. We see the worshipped and the worshippers together in “Cows and Pilgrims – 2008” and other poignant moments such as pilgrims taking cell phone pictures at Kanyakumari. Even static subjects are infused with drama as seen in his “Rocks, Outskirts of Hyderabad – 1984” or “The Wall” series and he similarly breathes life into national monuments by capturing “A Windy Rain” at the Taj Mahal, a dust storm at the Red Fort or wheat threshing at Humayun’s Tomb. The only stillness, perhaps, lies in his photographs from the Bhopal tragedy. The burial of an unknown child, aborted foetuses displayed in jars and a man carrying his dead wife evince a quiet that can only be brought on by tragedy and death.

To Rai, photography is akin to meditation. “Whatever I’ve learned about life is click by click,” he says. It has taught him to take a penetrative look at the world and yet he has also learned to be sensitive in any situation.

His penetrative look, in turn, makes the viewer look at life through a different lens. As I head back home from the NGMA at Fort, Mumbai, and past Oval Maidan, I’m stuck in the treacherous Mumbai traffic. At rush hour, I observe hundreds of umbrella-toting office-goers snaking through the rain-drenched maidan in a single file, along a marked mud-path. And I realise that I’m witnessing a Raghu Rai moment.

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