The photographer Raghu Rai was everywhere: capturing Arundhati Roy on the streets, Aatish Taseer as a kid, Shobha De at home, Indira Jaising in her office with a law book; archiving the aftermath of the 1984 Union Carbide gas leak in Bhopal, Tibetan exiles and the Dalai Lama in Dharamshala, Indira Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Taj Mahal, Churchgate station, Hampi,Ajanta, Ladakh....

Rai was everywhere because Rai was a journalist—first the chief photographer for The Statesman, then picture editor for Sunday magazine, then photo editor for India Today—and like any journalist worth their salt, his legacy gets mapped onto that of the nation because he found himself at the scene of every turn in the nation’s fortunes, eyes behind the lens, finger on shutter, the desire to make art lying in the shadow of the desire to archive.

You can read history into his photographs. For example, the silhouette of Indira Gandhi that Rai took in Shimla in 1967—a silhouette so distinct, with the sharp nose and the hair, you can immediately identify whom it belongs to—was used by the director Vikramaditya Motwane for the poster of his film Indi(r)a’s Emergency, giving the photograph an ominous afterlife by powerfully reading the Emergency into it..

Rai was everywhere, but it was the quality of how he chose to be everywhere that defines his body of work. The writer and photographer Teju Cole, when cutting down Steve McCurry’s “boring” photographs to size, had written: “Any given photograph encloses only a section of the world within its borders. A sequence of photographs, taken over many years and carefully arranged, however, reveals a world view.”

What, then, is the world view that Rai revealed through his oeuvre? His omnipresence, as attested in his photographs, never has the tenor of an imposition but is that of a quiet observer. If the private is the realm where one exists without performing one’s representation—what some, annoyingly, call “authentic”—Rai allowed his camera to enter this private without turning his subjects into representations of themselves but as though they had been caught in an act of deep selfhood.

Rarely, if ever, do you get the sense of Rai tampering with the scene. It is not a desire to not compose carefully but an ability to allow the natural chaos of life to enter the composition coherently, a coherence that then needs to be carefully observed, quickly captured. Rarely is there gloating in the photograph, barring his heavy photographs of deep, forceful contrasts: for example, the lone man reading a newspaper on a platform in Churchgate station as people, literally, blur into a puddle of rush hour around him, or rice grains being poured against a background of Bangladeshi refugees waiting in line.

The strange art form of photography

Photography is a strange art form because it bestows a kind of eternal death to its subject. This is something Roland Barthes contended with in Camera Lucida, where he sees photography as belonging to the heritage of heautoscopy, or hallucinating yourself. A photograph captures a moment long ceased, but one that is made present—not alive—every time the photograph is seen. That, then, is the first thing a photograph does, causing a conceptual wedge between being present and being alive, for it summons vanished people through portraits, vanished lands through landscapes, and commotions in bazaars long bulldozed by history. It allows the past to exist alongside the present as a death—a deathly presence—by stripping consciousness from the frames of people, landscapes, buildings, animals and letting that frame float through history as a fact.

A profound photograph, then, is one that is able to fill out that fact, bloat it with intention, consciousness, and possibility. In order to do that, a photograph must possess not just what Barthes called “studium”, or that affect which can be accessed through reading the ethical and political context of a photograph, but also “punctum”, a puncture that pierces the studium. Where Barthes notes that it is this punctum that “has the power of expansion”, I have interpreted that expansion as the aforementioned filling out of the photographic fact.

Rai’s photographs were a compendium of studiums: contexts that he collected with an eye for detail, details that can express more than just the obvious surface fact. For example, in the photo book Tibet in Exile, Rai captures a community settling into exile while never letting go of the ideal of return, however fragile. Here, monks debate agitatedly, there one is getting his head shaven. But he also photographs young Tibetan kids in school uniform, a new kind of modernity that exists alongside the maroon robes. A thoughtful archivist, Rai is able to summon worlds as they expand, by fracturing.

Then, suddenly, a piercing. Crowds gather to pray, and Rai captures a small boy in the crowd, dressed in a brocade chuba, the photograph taken at his eye level. Behind him are four women dressed in chubas and pangdens, and since the photograph is taken at the child’s eye level, the adult women are all cut off above the hip. Each hand of the child is held by a woman, while the other two women’s hands are folded in prayer.

Punctums are, often, accidents in photography. Turning through Rai’s photographs of the 1971 Bangladesh war, you see poignant images of people in refugee camps, bands of sweat woven around biceps carrying gunny sacks on heads, foreheads so deeply folded in furrows you could extract nine yards of skin from them, eyes so lost they cannot summon any feeling to the portrait except exhaustion. Again, a puncture. In a photograph of Indian soldiers celebrating victory, all smiles, no face is looking directly at the camera, except one in the second row, the lower half of the face cut off by a shadow, and both eyes so deeply fixed on the camera’s lens, it almost feels like an accusation.

The thing about the punctum is that, as Barthes notes, it is not “strictly intentional… it does not necessarily attest to the photographer’s art; it says only that the photographer was there, or else, still more simply, that he could not not photograph.…” It is this desire of Rai to be present—to increase the surface of his photography so that it touches the nation as frequently, as poignantly, as thoughtfully—that we experience as we scour his deep archives, filled with that ghostly feeling of watching the nation drift past us.

Prathyush Parasuraman is a writer and critic who writes across publications, both print and online.

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