India’s Most Celebrated Photographer Raghu Rai Dies
India’s most celebrated photographer, Raghu Rai, who spent more than five decades documenting the country, has died.
Renowned photojournalist Rai, widely regarded as a pioneer of photojournalism in India, died at the age of 83 on Sunday. He had been admitted to a private hospital. His son Nitin Rai, who is also a photographer, says his father had been dealing with cancer and age-related complications.
“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 says in a statement to India Today.
Over a career spanning more than five decades, Rai documented major moments in India’s modern history, including the Bangladesh refugee crisis in 1972 and the Bhopal gas tragedy. He also produced widely recognized portraits of figures such as Mother Teresa, Indira Gandhi, and the Dalai Lama. His work played a significant role in shaping modern photojournalism in India and gained international recognition. According to a report by the BBC, photographers and editors have often described Rai’s images as bridging reportage and art, combining immediacy with composition.
Rai was born on December 18, 1942, in Punjab, then part of undivided India. Trained as a civil engineer, he turned to photography during a break in his professional life after being introduced to the medium by his brother, photographer S Paul. His first published image, showing a donkey looking directly into the camera, appeared in The Times of London after his brother encouraged him to pursue photography.
Rai then began his career at The Statesman in 1966 and later served as photo editor at India Today. His work drew the attention of Henri Cartier-Bresson, and in 1977 he joined Magnum Photos.
Some of Rai’s best-known work are his photographs of former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, which remain significant visual records of political leadership in India. One of his most widely discussed photographs came after the Bhopal disaster, a toxic gas leak that killed an estimated 22,000 people. The photograph shows the face of a child partially buried in the earth, with eyes closed in death. It became one of the most recognized images of the tragedy in India.
In 2012, Raghu Rai and his son Nitin founded the Raghu Rai Center for Photography, which shares Rai’s 50 years of photographic expertise with the next generations of photographers.
