Raghu Rai Interview

A Smile from the Streets of India

Raghu Rai came to photography by accident. “I was staying with my elder brother Paul who was a photographer. We went to a village to take some pictures and when the film got developed, my brother sent one of my images to The Times in London. It was a picture of a baby donkey in the fading sunset. The picture editor there was Norman Hall, who was the editor of the BJP Annual and later editor of Photography Magazine. He saw this picture and published it half page in The Times. I was working in Civil Engineering because that was what my parents wanted me to do. It was a government job, everyone wanted a government job in India in the 1960s, but I hated it. So when this picture was published it was like a revelation to me and I thought, that’s it, I’m going to be a photographer.”

“So I became a photographer in 1965. I worked at the The Statesman in Calcutta. This was formerly a British newspaper and still had a British editor called Ivan Charlton; he had a wonderful respect for photography. I used to get lots of space: half pages and photo-features when something big happened. Then I worked for India Today from 1982-1991, which was a weekly magazine, I would get 12-14 pages for a story and I was free to choose assignments that interested me. But that was the last job I did. It’s better to be a free bird and do what I want to do.”

Throughout his career, the driving force of Rai’s work has been the energy of  Indian street photography. “A few years ago there was a French-led symposium on Street Photography held in Delhi. One of the speakers said street photography is dead. I took him on and said the purpose of street photography, or any photography, is to document the times we live in now. On the one hand this could be documenting the lives of famous people like Indira Gandhi or Mother Theresa, but for me the real purpose is to photograph the lives of ordinary people and their daily lives because that is what makes up the soul of this country.”

One of Rai’s earliest and best-know works demonstrates this affection for the ordinary Indian. It shows a street scene at Chowri Bazaar in Old Delhi. The image is criss-crossed with energy, as rickshaws, trolleys, carriages and bikes vie with horses, cows, labourers and schoolchildren for possession of the road. Down the middle of the picture, carriage tracks have left trails through what looks like frost. Bare-footed labourers push pipes down the roadway, while across the top of the picture a stream of horse-drawn carriages carry passengers to their place of work.

It is a photograph that could only have been made in India, but Rai recognizes that, “...photography is a western invention. The influences in Indian photography are people like Henri Cartier Bresson, Andre Kertesz and Robert Frank. They talk about capturing a space or a moment in time. India has different environments, religions and people. There is so much going on in one picture that your picture needs to take in. It has to be multi-layered to capture the complexity of India. They need not be one decisive moment, but several decisive moments. And that’s what I try to capture in my photographs. You have to remember India is not one country or one culture or one time. You look at that picture of Delhi and it could have been taken 200 years ago.”

Rai believes that not just anybody can photograph this world. “Let me tell you very honestly. India is my own world. It takes all of you mentally, physically and spiritually. Almost every photographer in the world comes to India at some point because, on the surface, India is a very easy country to photograph. But India is not something you can just walk into and understand as an outsider. I can walk around and sniff around and my photography is life itself. It’s not a style; it’s a way of being. My context and connectivity is with a larger space and a larger experience.”

So India may be easy for foreign street photographers. There will be colour, chaos and a diverse range of people and places. The photographic possibilities are endless, yet the complexity of what is in front of one’s eyes cannot be underestimated. Nothing is simple here, nothing is straightforward and everything has a meaning and significance. If you don’t understand those meanings, if you can’t read those signs, signs which are engrained into Indian ways of thinking and being, then how can you portray it? And if you don’t portray it in your pictures, if you are missing out all these vital elements, then how can your pictures or what you are attempting to communicate be trusted.

One could say that only locals can truly understand the street scenes of somewhere like New York, Paris or Tokyo. However, India is such a complex, multi-layered society that this applies more than for any other country in the world. At the same time, just as different cities have different styles of representation, so they have different ways of working; New York has the in-your-face style of Bruce Gilden or William Klein, photographers who isolate the individual and the anxiety, Tokyo the strange anonymity of Daido Moriyama or Shomei Tomatsu and Paris the romance and nostalgia of Cartier-Bresson, Doisneau and Brassai.  For Rai, street photography with Indian characteristics is about joining the flow and being invisible. When Rai photographs, he uses minimal equipment and is as inconspicuous as possible. He is not an outsider in the crowd; he is part of the crowd.

While street photography is Rai’s first love, he has also worked as a photojournalist covering some of India’s most traumatic events. The worst of these was undoubtedly Bhopal in 1984: a disaster where a gas leak at the US-owned Union Carbide plant killed over 8,000 people in the days after the event and many more in the years that followed.  The disaster became synonymous with corporate criminality and evasion of responsibility that continues to this day. Raghu Rai arrived in Bhopal the day after the leak and took the picture that became the symbol of the world’s worst industrial disaster. It shows a child being buried in a rough mix of soil and stone. His body is wrapped in some kind of shroud but the face is uncovered. A hand brushes his forehead in a gesture of comfort. The eyes of the child are empty, clouded over, as though burnt by the chemicals of Bhopal, his mouth open in an expression of exhaustion and fatigue. Nobody knows who he child his, his body was never claimed and for all its sadness the picture is strangely fatalistic and calm.

Rai returned to Bhopal and worked with Greenpeace, but found the tragedy too much to bear. “It’s a never-ending story because people are still dying there. I made a book and an exhibition and it did make a difference at one time but when you go into tragic situations like that, it takes a toll on you. I was there from the start and in the first three days the gas was still there in the bodies of people and animals, seeping out. Seeing so much death is terrible and going back was also painful because you see all this suffering and you truly can’t change their lives. You need healing after that.”

For Rai, healing comes with the camera. “The moment you put a camera on your eye, your focus becomes clearer and you start learning about where you come from. When I take pictures I am exploring the people around me, the streets around me, the world around me.”

One city that Rai is drawn to is the holy city of Varanasi. This is where many Hindus come to burn their dead. The holiest cremation site in Varanasi is Manikarnika Ghat. Cremation here means instant liberation from the burden of life, a release from the endless cycles of reincarnation and suffering. In recent years, Rai has started using panoramic cameras to take in the totality of experiences that make up India. In his picture of Manikarnika Ghat, a line of men stand across the image, echoing Rai’s belief that his pictures represent a ‘horizontal experience’ of India with life stretching out in all directions beyond the frame. “There is no exact story I’m telling here. The body language and expressions capture the spirit and energy of the place. My wife gets very angry when she sees this picture because of the man on the right is holding his thing. She sees this and says to me. ‘You Indian men are stupid!’”

Most of Rai’s work is in black and white, but he has also shot in colour. “Earlier we used to do all black and white, but then foreign magazines worked in colour so things began to change. Different subjects require different responses. Sometimes the colours won’t gel. They can dig a hole in the space of the picture. Black and white puts a filter on the situation. It silences the noises of the colours, because colours have an emotional and physical response. India is a very colourful country but it doesn’t work for all subjects. I couldn’t have done the work on Mother Teresa in colour. My training was in black and white, and because of that it makes more sense to me. For me the best test of colour is if it can convert to black and white, it’s a good colour picture.”

Economically, India has changed radically in the 40 years that Rai has been photographing, and this had had effects in the way India is represented domestically. “Indian Photography has changed. It is going through a turning. Now everyone has a cell phone and they take a few pictures, then they think ‘oh, that looks interesting.’ So they buy a camera and start taking pictures. The tragic thing is we all have computers so we see thousands and thousands of pictures, pictures from all over the world. For example, people see work by Lee Friedlander and they try to copy him. But when Friedlander does something it’s new. When somebody else sees Friedlander’s work and tries to do the same, they are just making an inferior copy. Very little original work gets done.”

“I am against style. If style emerges from your personal life, from your experiences and your need to photograph then I can understand it. But too often style is just copied, and then you end up with rubbish. As an example, a few years ago, a very direct, hard flash was popular and we ended up with lots of pictures of people looking startled and stupid. You need to be responsive and sensitive, to receive something and not just grab it.”

“Globalisation is happening so fast in India. There is a difference in the energy on the street so you capture these changes in your images, but this doesn’t change your photography. As I’ve mentioned, I’m not fond of style. The poet Khalil Gibran said, ‘These children are not my children or your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They came through you but not from you and though they are with you yet they belong not to you’.  I want my image to be ‘the Life’s longing for itself.’”

“If people can connect with my pictures and enjoy them that is enough for me. It’s like you are walking down the street and you smile at someone and they smile back. There is nothing given and nothing taken. It is just like a little nudge, a recognition of humanity and life. That is what photography means to me. It is my profession, it is my religion, it is my karma, it is my life.”

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