“There was a time, immediately after my father passed away, when I didn’t want to pick up the camera again,” says photographer Avani Rai. “It wasn’t because I had stopped believing in photography. It was because I had lost my most important audience.”
For Avani, photography had always ended with her father, veteran photojournalist Raghu Rai. “My greatest validation was always seeing him proud of me as his daughter,” she says.
Months after his death, Avani is back behind her camera, taking over her father’s contribution to Pirelli’s 2027 calendar — The Cal™ — ‘India, Beyond a Single Gaze’.
The calendar marks the first time in its history that two photographers have been brought together for the same edition. It places India at its centre through the contrasting perspectives of Norwegian fashion photographer Sølve Sundsbø and Indian photographer Raghu Rai, whose archival work is reinterpreted by his daughter Avani following his death in April.
Launched in the 1960s as a marketing giveaway for the Italian tyre company, Pirelli’s calendar has since become one of the most influential platforms for fashion photography. But The Cal™ has also faced criticism over its lack of diversity and narrow ideals of beauty. In recent years, the publication has responded to changing conversations around representation, with editions featuring women such as Serena Williams and Yoko Ono, and an all-Black cast in 2018.
For its India edition, however, the fashion calendar expands its frame to include the streets, people and stories of the country.
An outsider’s eye
For Sundsbø, the challenge was the difficulty of capturing a country that cannot easily be contained within a single frame. “I come to India as a guest, as a tourist,” he says. “It’s hard not to be captivated by the intensity of its colours, sounds, the smells, the people, its ancient culture.” But attempting to capture all of it, he says, would be “a terrifying task”. So he narrowed his gaze. “My brief to myself was simple. When you close your eyes and think of India, what do you see?” he says. “I am not sure if I have avoided the clichés or if I even wanted to avoid them.”
Rather than attempting to represent an entire country, Sundsbø chose to photograph the women in front of his camera. His cast includes actors Aditi Rao Hydari, Avantika Vandanapu and Freida Pinto, artists Anoushka Shankar, Rupi Kaur, models Bhavitha Mandava and Lakshmi Menon, and photographer-filmmaker Avani herself. “I concentrated on the person in front of me, what they wanted out of the image as well as what I did,” he says. “The fact we did this in India meant that the textures and light came naturally to the image based on where we were.”
His approach was also shaped by an awareness of his position as an outsider. Sundsbø says he did not feel he could photograph India alone. For him, the presence of Raghu Rai — and later Avani — was essential, giving each photographer room to find their own focus. “I did portraits of women from India, and she captured its ‘soul’,” Sundsbø says.
In her father’s footsteps
While Sundsbø narrowed his gaze to individual portraits, Avani took the project into the streets of Old Delhi returning to places like Kinari Bazar and the Yamuna Ghat her father had photographed over decades. The project was initially conceived with Raghu Rai’s unpublished photographs forming the backdrop for contemporary images shot in a studio. But when Avani took over, she felt her father belonged in the streets.
“The city felt like an archive long before I lifted my camera,” she says. “Old Delhi has changed in countless visible ways, but it still carries the same rhythms, the same conversations, the same ability to surprise you if you’re willing to wait.”
Avani selected images made by her father and returned to some of the locations photographing performers, artisans, and everyday residents of Old Delhi. “Walking those streets, I wasn’t only looking at the present. I was also aware of all the moments my father had witnessed there over six decades. It almost felt as though his photographs still existed in the air.”
Her photographs became a dialogue between time rather than an attempt to reproduce her father’s gaze. “His gaze and mine weren’t competing with each other. They were simply meeting in the same place, decades apart,” she says. She resists the idea of photographing like her father, choosing instead to stand behind his work — literally and metaphorically — while allowing her own perspective to emerge.
Picking up the camera again
Her return to the camera was initially complicated by grief. Asked if it changed the way she looked through the camera, she says: “Yes. It made me slower.”
But the camera was also what brought her back. “The greatest gift he ever placed in my hands was the camera itself, as a way of being in the world,” she says. “If I chose to stop photographing because he was no longer here, I would also be turning away from the very gift he had spent a lifetime giving me.”
For Avani, the project was also an attempt to answer a question larger than her own relationship with her father: how does one photograph India without pretending that it can be fully understood?
“India’s essence lies in its contradictions,” she says. “It’s a country where several centuries coexist. Where faith and technology, tradition and reinvention, intimacy and spectacle all exist side by side without feeling the need to resolve themselves.”
She did not try to photograph India as an idea. Instead, she photographed its people — artisans, gestures, expressions and relationships. She says: “If you’re honest enough with one human being, you begin to say something truthful about the place they inhabit.”