The photographer and pioneer of Indian photojournalism, Raghu Rai, has died.
Producing over 30 books on subjects including Tibetan exile, Mother Teresa, Indira Gandhi and Sikhs in India, Rai’s most famous project came in 1984 when he covered the chemical disaster at Bhopal, first for India Today, which featured his shocking photograph focused on the corpse of single young boy, his blinded face staring out of the rubble. Later he was commissioned by Greenpeace and produced the book Exposure: A Corporate Crime, and three exhibitions that toured Europe, the US and Bangladesh.
Rai had joined India Today two years previous from The Statesman where he began his career in 1966. Rai was born in Jhang in British India (Pakistan after partition) and, after initially studying civil engineering, followed in the footsteps of his older brother, known as S Paul, who was already taking photographs. It was he who entered Rai’s photograph of a donkey into a weekly competition run by The Times in London. It won, and Rai was able to live off the modest prize money for a month.
In 1977, under the patronage of Henri Cartier Bresson, Rai became a member of Magnum Photos. In 1972 he was awarded the Padma Shri for his work on the 1971 India-Pakistan War and the plight of Bangladeshi refugees.
‘It’s fulfilling to know one is going deeper into the layers of complexity of my country,’ he told the Observer in 2010. ‘I like being among my own people. I merge with them. I don’t carry camera bags, I don’t wear stylish clothes. I have one camera with a zoom lens so I am not alarming people; no one is saying, “Here comes a photographer!”’
