First came the professional, the photographer, whose photo essays or photographs one wanted for the various magazines, and, later, the publishing house I worked for.
At a time when most Indian photographers in a closed economy of scarce opportunities were happy to share their colour transparencies for whatever little it earned them, Raghu Rai was unattainable, inaccessible, and unwilling to sell his talent for a whistle and a song. He was neither herd, nor its head; he was simply apart. He earned and lent Indian photography the dignity it had not had before.
Then came the personal. I came to Delhi at a difficult time in his personal life, not that it mattered, because I was a friend of his first wife’s friend at a time when separations were rare – and the couple continued to amicably work together on projects, even though he married again. To Raghu’s credit, he remained his unflappable professional self and did not allow the personal to colour his work life or his ability to draw on his own deeply emotional and empathetic self to create images that have long become the visual lexicon of the nation and of humanity (or its loss). Through his pictures, he taught us to look at and evaluate ourselves.
If it was a pleasure to publish Raghu’s work, every meeting with him was a privilege, whether for an interview, at social or even formal occasions, or, indeed, for a panel discussion where, on one occasion, he told me he was astounded by how much an art writer could read into a work of art.
“You must curate for me,” he half-joked, “I want you to interpret my photographs.” He would rib me about this every time we met, yet I never took him seriously because Raghu’s work never required interpretation. They spoke not only as pictures but as words and as a record of our times – the social, the political, the anthropological, the aesthetical, the documentative.
Those photographs that form his legacy will, of course, outlive him – but for those of us who knew him intermittently, professionally, briefly, the enigma and the larger-than-life persona who took nothing but his photography seriously, will be the person we will continue to seek and see in his works.
(Kishore Singh is an art writer, curator and former columnist who has authored a number of books on a range of subjects, including travel, history and art)