India lost one of its most iconic visual storytellers this week. Raghu Rai, the legendary photographer whose career spanned decades and defined how the world saw the subcontinent, passed away on April 26. He was 83.
Rai’s wide-angle lens captured everything from political upheaval to everyday street life with a cinematic tension that, as The Hindu noted, preceded cinema’s own visual language. His story was “intricately linked with that of India,” and tributes poured in recognizing that he didn’t merely photograph the nation — he invented a way of seeing it. His body of work, numbering thousands of photographs, stands as an irreplaceable visual archive of modern Indian history.
