Raghu Rai: the engineer who spent sixty years photographing India

From engineering to a first published picture

Raghu Rai was born in 1942 in Jhang, a village in Punjab that is now part of Pakistan. PetaPixel gives his date of birth as 18 December 1942. He trained as a civil engineer.

Photography came through family. His brother, the photographer S. Paul, introduced him to the camera during a break in his working life. His first published picture showed a donkey looking straight into the lens, and it appeared in The Times of London.

According to Magnum Photos he took up photography in 1965, when he was about 23, and the following year he joined The Statesman newspaper in Delhi as its chief photographer.

“A photograph has picked up a fact of life, and that fact will live forever.”

— Raghu Rai, via Magnum Photos

Newspapers, magazines and Magnum

He stayed at The Statesman until 1976. His pictures of the 1971 Bangladesh war and its refugees became some of his best-known work, and the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art says he received the Padma Shri in 1972 for that work. Magnum's own profile gives the year as 1971.

An exhibition of his photographs in Paris in the early 1970s caught the eye of Henri Cartier-Bresson, the French photographer famous for candid street pictures. Cartier-Bresson nominated him to Magnum Photos, the photographers' cooperative, and he joined in 1977. The museum describes Cartier-Bresson as a mentor of his early years.

After The Statesman he became picture editor of Sunday, a weekly news magazine published from Calcutta. From 1982 to 1991 he was picture editor, visualiser and photographer at India Today during its formative years, producing picture essays on social, political and cultural themes.

Bhopal, books and a long life with the camera

In December 1984 a gas leak at Bhopal killed thousands of people. Rai's photographs, including the face of a child half buried in the earth, became defining records of the disaster. He did not leave the subject there. Magnum notes that he later completed an in-depth documentary project for Greenpeace on the disaster and its continuing effects on survivors, which became a book and exhibitions that toured from 2004, the twentieth anniversary.

He produced more than 18 books, on Delhi, the Sikhs, Calcutta, Khajuraho, the Taj Mahal, Tibet in exile, Mother Teresa and India itself. His 1992 National Geographic cover story on wildlife management in India was widely praised. He served three times on the jury of the World Press Photo contest. In 2009 France made him an Officier des Arts et des Lettres, and in 2019 he was the first laureate of the Académie des beaux-arts Photography Award.

In 2012 he and his son Nitin, also a photographer, founded the Raghu Rai Center for Photography to pass on what he had learned. He died in Delhi on 26 April 2026, aged 83, after an illness.

The skills and habits that made the difference

The first was staying with a subject. He returned to Bhopal for two decades after the disaster, and the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art describes long-duration projects photographing political and spiritual leaders over many years.

The second was closeness to people. Al Jazeera notes that he photographed India's political and social elite and its ordinary crowds with equal energy, and his best-known portraits, of Mother Teresa and Indira Gandhi, come from being near his subjects again and again.

The third was the daily habit of looking. The museum describes how he photographed India's streets and lanes, walls and bazaars, treating everyday life as live theatre.

The fourth was range. Over his career he worked on film and later digital, in black and white and in colour, and moved between news, portraits, architecture and nature. He also kept learning from other photographers, from Cartier-Bresson early on to the juries he sat on later, and in the end he shared what he knew through his own centre for photography.