Photographer and photojournalist Raghu Rai's works are on display at the Aurodhan Art Gallery here.
Most of the photographs displayed are shots of ordinary men and women in the course of their everyday life. But these pictures lend themselves to be interpreted in varied forms.
There is a picture of an old man smiling at an Rs 50 note in the corner of the snap; the reward for the work he has just finished. Rai explains this phenomenon in his own words: “The panoramic frame, on which I have shot most of my pictures, gives you the scope to capture different moments living together simultaneously. Thus, each image can have so much human energy in it.”
Not many have received the kind of accolades and awards that Rai has won. After all, it is not common for someone to get recommended to Magum by Henri Cartier Bresson himself. And, he is one of the few photographers to be awarded the Padma Shri.
But Rai was very young then. In fact, it was only seven years after Bresson wrote the letter of recommendation that Rai actually used it. And he says he did this because he was “bored with clicking pictures for newspapers.”
Talking about the change in technology, Rai says that the advent of digital photography has made it impossible to go back to film photography because of the freedom that the former gives. Even the little difference between the grains of the film and the pixels will be set right in the future, he points out.
All the fame he has accumulated over the years does not affect his work because “the focus when you click a picture is always on the moment.”
His advice to aspiring photographers is just one: do not try to reproduce a picture that you have already seen.
