What I've Learnt: Raghu Rai

I had no plans of becoming a photographer. My elder brother was a keen photographer. One day, I was

going with one of my brother's friends to his village. I said to my brother, “Give me a camera—I’ll take some pictures.” That is how a camera first came to hang over my shoulder.

In the village, I saw a baby donkey, looking very cute and funny. I chased it when it started running,

and took a picture when it got tired and stood still. My brother was impressed with the photograph, and sent it to The Times, the British newspaper. A few weekends later, they printed it on their back page. Everyone thought it was a big deal, but it didn’t matter to me very much.

What made that picture work so well was my instinctive feeling for the situation and moment. When you

look for pictures and compositions, you take regular photos. Things become more potent when your instinct tells you to capture a moment. Those pictures become extraordinary.

Structure and composition come from the elements that make daily life. If you're not obsessed by

the rules and regulations of composition, you create a structure as per the situation. Your photograph then has a power and freshness of its own. Instant spontaneity is very important.

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If your eyes are tied to the mind, sentimentality and past influences take over. But when you're truly present—in the here and now—your response becomes instinctive and immediate.

Unless there is silence in that big computer we call 'the mind', there can be no clarity. We are

constantly controlled by our minds. Every time we want to do something, it tells us, “This is right, that is wrong.” The mind is the biggest hurdle to creativity. You cannot format it. To directly perceive the situation in front of you, you must try to connect your eyes to your heart.

It is important to not get coloured by any emotion when you're working. If you get coloured by

emotion—be it tragedy, shame, or happiness—that emotion reflects in your work. The job of a reporter or a photographer is to capture and reflect the truth, what is truthfully happening in a situation, whether emotionally or politically. The camera will always defend and protect you.

Being a photojournalist gave me privilege. It gave me access to situations. I met prime ministers and

musicians, Satyajit Ray and Mother Teresa. Those were very powerful experiences for me.

Never entertain the notion that you can change the world. All you can do is maybe nudge it. The

world is not waiting for a messiah to inject life into it. Look at what is happening around us. What have we learnt from wars, from madness, from fanaticism? The world is becoming more and more destructive. Look at Trump, look at Putin. What have they learned, and from where?

The India of 5-60 years ago encapsulated the poetry of who we were. Compared to that, today’s

India is more chaotic and expressionless. The new big governmental projects do not reflect character or continuity, not in terms of architecture, or in terms of our country’s ethos.

A painter can paint the sky green to match his landscape. He can blend colours the way he wants. But

when we take a colour photograph, we cannot change anything, whether the colours blend or not. Nobody asks why an artist has painted the sky green, but if we photographers do something similar, we are accused of manipulation. Converting photos to black-and-white helps remove the noise of colours. Tones blend with each other, no matter what the mood or situation.

Digital technology was a sudden shock to me. When I first picked up a digital camera and took a picture,

I could see the photo right away. That was fantastic! I remember having been given a big assignment to photograph Bombay just days after I bought my first six-megapixel camera. I barely used film for that shoot. It feels like the first day I used digital was the last day I used film.

If someone looks at my body of work a hundred years from now, I think they’ll see the visual history

of India—the way we lived then. If good journalism is the first draft of history, then a good image is the first visual evidence of that history. That is the real sanctity of my profession.

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