Written by Georgina Maddox
“A photograph has picked up a fact of life, and that fact will live forever,” Raghu Rai once said. Rai (1942–2026) passed away on the 26th of April 2026, after a stoic two-year battle with cancer. He leaves a mark on the art and culture community, alongside the newsmakers and documentarians who all mourn his passing. His last rites were held at Lodhi Crematorium on Sunday evening.
At 83, Rai leaves behind his wife, Gurmeet, a conservation architect, and his children: son Nitin and daughters Lagan, Avani, and Purvai Rai. He witnessed India’s sojourn over the last five decades through the lens of his camera. The Padma Shri awardee was the protégé of one of the godfathers of street photography—Henri Cartier-Bresson. Rai is celebrated for his gritty slice-of-life images that have captured the public imagination.
“It seems centuries ago that my elder brother S. Paul sowed seeds inside me—some of which germinated into music, others into poetry, and countless into nature itself,” wrote Rai in his catalogue of Trees, a significant exhibition that showcased his purely aesthetic side, as opposed to the news-making documentary photographs that he is well known for. Through this writing, he acknowledges his mentor and inspiration—his brother Paul, who turned Rai, then a civil engineer, towards the lens. He sent Rai’s early photographs taken in Haryana to The Times in London in the 1960s. The winner was an image of a little donkey, a symbol of diligence, loyalty, and honour—values that Rai enshrined in his career. The photograph won Rai acknowledgement, prize money, and a subsequent friendship with Cartier-Bresson. Subsequently impressed by an exhibition of Rai’s photographs—particularly his work on the Bangladesh refugee crisis—at Galerie Delpire in Paris in 1971, Cartier-Bresson nominated Raghu Rai to Magnum Photos in 1972.
“Raghu was the archivist of India, and though he won’t be there to make more images, his vast archive will live on forever,” says international photographer and archivist Dayanita Singh.
When this writer first met Raghu Rai in Mumbai at the National Gallery of Modern Art, it was at the display of his stunning body of work featuring the international icon, the Albanian nun and canonized saint, Mother Teresa. He called her the “Saint who walked the earth,” and Rai didn’t speak vociferously because he let his imagery do the talking. He had spent nearly five decades photographing and documenting Mother Teresa’s work with the sick, the needy, and the poor.
As far as subjects went, it was hard-hitting, and though Rai worked primarily in a photojournalistic mode, he always held the aesthetics of the ‘decisive moment’ in high regard. However, it was only later that one got to see the purely aesthetic side of his work, especially when he held the exhibition Trees in 2013 at PHOTOINK, New Delhi.
“Raghu Rai’s street photographs of a modernizing India from the 1960s to 1990s are arguably his most important works. They reside in our nation’s collective conscience as an incontestable testimony to the secular nature of its citizenry, which has been eroding thereafter,” says Devika Daulet-Singh, the founder of PHOTOINK (2001), a photo agency and publication design studio based in New Delhi. In 2008, PHOTOINK expanded into a gallery to exhibit contemporary Indian photography and international photographers.
“Secularism as an ideology was not appealing to him. Instead, he was deeply interested in secularism as a practice and how it simply existed around him. He photographed a Muslim woman praying and the immersion of Durga with similar curiosity and attention. In his later years, he resisted attempts to partition his archive to serve narrow sectarian interests. He did not permit any appropriation or re-captioning of his photographs. He spent his life making visible the unseen, the ordinariness of life, and drawing attention to the adjacency of different faiths without genuflection,” Singh opines.
These qualities enumerated by Daulet-Singh are an important context for Rai’s work to be understood as a marker of India’s secular nature, its multiculturalism, and its openness as a society.
Rai’s photographs told these stories, and it is this quality that drew many to love his work. “I was first introduced to Raghu Rai through his evocative photo features in India Today—stories where he would go deep into a subject, presenting 10 to 15 powerful images accompanied by a brief, thoughtful introduction. That form of visual storytelling left a lasting impression on me. It was then I began to see photography not just as an image, but as a narrative tool,” says photographer Parthiv Shah, the founder-director of CMAC (Centre for Media and Alternative Communication, Delhi).
Rai was a master of this craft. “Whether it was Indira Gandhi, Mother Teresa, or the Dalai Lama, he approached every subject with depth, patience, and relentless dedication. His passion drove him to create stories through hundreds of frames, especially when it came to Indian classical musicians, a world he deeply loved,” says Shah, adding, “Remembering Raghu Rai today… a master behind the lens, but for me, also a companion in conversations beyond photography. We often drifted into the world of Indian classical music—his true passion, and one I shared deeply. It feels strange that the light he captured so effortlessly has dimmed, yet somewhere, I like to think, a raga he loved is still playing on.”
One could look forward to the screening of the film Raghu Rai: An Unframed Portrait, a film by his youngest daughter, filmmaker Avani Rai, which has been described as a fond and respectful tribute. We are told that in the final frame, Avani signals her independence from her mentor and father. When advised to take a photograph in a particular way, Avani did her ‘own thing’ and framed her father in a long shot. We will always remember him in long shot, surrounded by trees, smiling with the camera dangling from his neck. In fact, at the crematorium, his camera—a Kodak ColorPlus 200—was placed on his body, which was wrapped in its ceremonial white shroud and flowers… we will remember that he always took photographs with his heart as much as he did with his viewfinder.
A memorial for Rai will be held on May 2 at the Chinmaya Mission Centre on Lodhi Road at 6 pm. PHOTOINK will be publishing a book titled Photographed that documents Rai’s work and life from the 1960s onwards.
All image courtesy goes to Raghu Rai Foundation
Georgina is an independent critic-curator with 18 years of experience in the field of Indian art and culture. She blurs the lines of documentation, theory and praxis by involving herself in visual art projects. Besides writing on immersive art for STIRworld, she is a regular contributor for The Hindu, MASH Mag and Architectural Digest.
