26/04/2026
Raghu Rai (18 December 1942 – 26 April 2026)
Raghu Rai has died in Delhi at 83. The headlines are leading with Magnum, with Cartier-Bresson, with the year the Western canon let him in. We want to start somewhere else.
He wanted to be a musician first. The camera came after, but the music never left him. From the mid-1960s, and in earnest from the mid-1980s as Photo Editor at India Today, he set himself a task no photographer of his stature had taken on with comparable seriousness: a sustained visual record of the men and women who carried the Hindustani and Carnatic traditions through the late twentieth century.
The roll call is its own argument. Ravi Shankar. Ali Akbar Khan. M.S. Subbulakshmi. Bismillah Khan. Vilayat Khan. Kishori Amonkar. Bhimsen Joshi. Mallikarjun Mansur. Kumar Gandharva. Alla Rakha. Zakir Hussain. Hari Prasad Chaurasia. S. Balachander. He photographed them on stage and at home, with their gurus and their tanpuras, mid-alaap and mid-laughter. Most are now gone. In many cases his frames are the definitive ones we have of them.
What set the work apart was that Rai was a rasik — a listener before he was a photographer.
He did not approach the maestros as exotic subjects to be translated for a foreign gaze. He approached them the way a student approaches a guru. The intimacy in those images is the intimacy of someone who knew when to lower the camera and listen.
He once said the music inside him came through every photograph he ever took, whatever the subject. We believe him. You can hear it.
Rest in raag, Raghu ji.
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