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Raghu Rai: A Retrospective

"Over the centuries, so much has melded into India, that it's not really one country, and it's not one culture. It is crowded with crosscurrents of many religions, beliefs, cultures and their practices that may appear incongruous. But India keeps alive the inner spirit of her own civilization with all its contradictions. Here, several centuries have learnt to live side by side at the same time. And a good photograph is a lasting witness to that, as photography is a history of our times: being a multi-lingual, multi- cultured and multi- religious society, the images must speak these complexities through a multi-layered experience." (Raghu Rai)

Born in 1942 in a village that is now part of Pakistan, Raghu Rai took up the camera with seriousness after one of his photographs was published in The [British] Times in 1966: "It sort of tickled me and soon photography became a passion. It was just by chance, not that I wanted to become a photographer". He started off with a box camera presented to him by his brother. He was 'discovered' in 1977 by Cartier Bresson at an exhibition in Paris, and then invited to become a member of Magnum. Since then Rai has taken India as his canvas and produced works that he simply describes as slicing out spaces and moments in front of him. These spaces are often tumultuous, multivalent and polyphonic but also on other occasions capture an individual's stillness or a moment of calm within the ongoing flux.

Rai has taken the documentary form associated with Cartier-Bresson and the Magnum tradition and pushed it in a way that responds to the specificities of India. He brings a sense of the multitude compared to the relatively confined picture planes of Western modernist photographers. Rai has talked about the experience of being immersed within India as being a 'horizontal' experience, suggesting that at any one moment of immersion, India stretches on seemingly infinitely in all directions. In each work there is the strong suggestion that life and the crowds teem on beyond the frame - indeed sometimes a stray foot or other parts of bodies outside the borders of the photograph directly attest to this.

Rai captures the ways in which the past co-exists with the present in India, and on a more subtle level he captures the visual rhymes and congruities between very different components in his works. One might argue that Rai only has one subject: India. His works attest to a multi-layered reality, where people, objects, animals and buildings jostle with each other, where people's own personal space is overlaid and invaded by each other's space, where temporalities rub up against each other. His works are extracted from a complex external reality: "When I slice out a space, a moment, it should be done with such simplicity and faithfulness that when I give it back to life, life starts moving and flowing around it without a stutter.

Along with this solo exhibition at the Aicon Gallery, London, Raghu Rai's works are a central part of the exhibition 'Where Three Dreams Cross: 150 Years of Photography from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh" that runs at the Whitechapel Gallery, London from 20 January to 11 April before touring to the Fotomuseum Winterthur from 11 June to 22 August.