FRAMES OF REFERENCE
With a Padma Shri, a World Press Photo award and countless other accolades to his name, India’s greatest living photographer, Raghu Rai, is celebrating the golden jubilee of his photography career this year and has published a selection of his finest port
Looking back at your 50-year-long career as a photographer, how has the journey been?
A. Well, I can only wish to be reborn as a photographer [ laughs]. Q. How did you decide to get into photojournalism? A. My brother, Paul, was working as the chief photographer with The Indian Express. I used to see him getting published every week, and I thought it's not a bad idea to become a photographer and work for a newspaper. I was being trained as a civil engineer in the early 1960s, but did the job in Delhi and hated it. Inspired by my brother, when I joined The Statesman in West Bengal, I never went back to civil engineering. Q. In the introduction to your book People, you have described your portraits as mostly “posed pictures” and how shooting the same has always made you feel uncomfortable. If you could shed some light on portrait photography. Would candid pictures of ordinary people also qualify as portraits? A. Yes, yes. As long as the frame can capture the strength of each individual, it becomes a character portrait. A portrait does not necessarily mean that every- body has to just sit straight, look into the camera and pose for you. When I take a person's portrait, I am trying to capture the aura of that person, that person's spirit in the picture. I am trying to get the truth of that person to emerge in the photograph. Q. How then do you distinguish street photography from portrait photography? A. Street photography in- volves general activity and interactions of life but in portrait, there's a specific focus on a person. In street photography, you are trying to capture the lives of people through their daily interactions but in a portrait, the person, not the surrounding, becomes the boldest element in the frame. Q. From your book, I see that you have had a range of favourite sub- jects (among celebrities) for portraits, and Satyajit Ray was one such figure. Did you get to meet Nemai Ghosh, too, while shooting on Ray's sets? A. No, because Ghosh used to shoot stills long ago. When I was photographing Ray during the mid-80s, Nemai was not shooting on a regular basis, you know.