India’s Photographic Master

Over his 40-year career as one of India’s most respected photographers, Raghu Rai has captured his native land in good times and bad, richly depicting the increasing complexity of living in what is now one of the world’s most rapidly developing countries. Equally adept at humorously evoking the day-to-day rituals and activities of Indian life (his breakthrough photograph, published in the UK’s The Times in 1966, was of a donkey that he had spent hours chasing across farmland) as he is at sensitively depicting the horrors of disasters such as the toxic spill in Bohal in 1984, Rai was invited to join the Magnum photographic agency in 1977, and has since been decorated with a string of international prizes. London’s Aicon gallery is currently mounting a retrospective of his work.