The well known news photographer Raghu Rai, who could see beauty in every street corner, draw out divinity and the comic in equal measure from a human face and who gave us many unforgettable pictures by which we understood India, died in Delhi after a long fight with cancer on Sunday (April 26). He was 83. The camera in his hand, mostly a Nikon, was like a painter’s brush. Like any artist, he could see what the regular eye could not and he got his best pictures when he walked the streets of Kolkata and Delhi. He was a moving algorithm of art and beauty. To see him with the camera was to see an animated man moving helter skelter, as if he was worried that around the corner was something waiting to be captured.This was how he shot one of the most beautiful pictures out of the chaos of Chandni Chowk, “Evening prayer, Jama Masjid 1982”. He was walking down a staircase in the crowded Chandni Chowk when he saw a lady kneeling down in prayer as the fading evening light cast a halo of light around here through the open door of a small room. In the background, the Jama Masjid loomed like a sentinel and loitering clouds gave the photo a holy feel. “Rai was the M.F. Husain of photography. Husain painted the immediate…thereby making the painting a part of the history that has been visually registered… If one animates Rai’s pictures they would impart the feel of another of Ray’s movies,” Johny M.L., senior art curator, wrote on Facebook.Streets were his playgroundSome of Rai’s best street photos came from Chandni Chowk, be it the labourers pushing the cart or the many struggles of the people who led subhuman lives. In the early part of his career, the street was Rai’s playfield and he mastered the art in Kolkata, where he worked for the Statesman. It was from the street that he shot the picture of a municipal worker sweeping away election posters. Indira Gandhi’s face could be seen staring helplessly from one of those posters. In another photograph from Kolkata, where a transgender person (hijra) was posing for him, another man can be seen passing by, stretching out to pinch the cheeks of the poseur. There was humour, sadness and pathos in most of his frames.It would be apt to say that his life’s best photographs were exhibited two years ago at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in a show titled ‘A thousand Lives: Photographs 1965 to 2005′. Rai seemed to have put all his effort into it perhaps with the thought that this could be his last show. It was one of the great shows in Indian photography and through those pictures we could see India evolve as a nation, from chaos to some sort of order. We could see Rai trying to elevate the ordinary into the epic or the ethereal “Even a breeze blowing, what does it do to you and the entire space around you. That is what is magical about ongoing everyday life,” Rai wrote in the introduction to a section of the exhibition. Photographing powerBut nothing prepared us over the years for his photographs of those in power. Indira Gandhi, who loved photographers and who had an annual photo session on her birthday, was transformed by Rai. He had access to the prime minister’s house throughout her tenure and he went there every alternate day, Rai used to say. It was on one such occasion when he entered through a back door that he saw a phalanx of ministers standing around her, some of them with their heads bowed. Indira Gandhi was looking at some papers with her back to the camera. Sycophancy had many forms. But it was the first time that we got to see how the country was run. A news photographer had to be at the right place at the right time. Raghu had that knack. He was always everywhere. How else could he have got the monumental picture of Maneka Gandhi, minutes after being thrown out of the house by Indira Gandhi, the outcome of a classic saas-bahu battle, standing alone on Safdarjung Road with bags and a young Varun Gandhi. Indira’s love or acceptance of photographers came from her father, Jawaharlal Nehru, who always had a crowd with a camera around him. Nehru allowed himself to be viewed at all times. Maybe Nehru wanted his life to be laid bare before the country. He did not see the photographer as an adversary or intruder. Unlike Narendra Modi, who is deeply suspicious and wary of all and sundry, and thus has all his pictures choreographed while regular news photographers are kept away. At times, Nehru was aware of being photographed and on many other occasions completely oblivious. It was out of such an attitude of large heartedness and a grand view of the universe and the country that some of India’s greatest news photographs became possible. In that sense, Nehru was often a collaborator in the making of history’s images just as Indira was to be throughout her tenure as well. Into this tradition, Raghu fit in well. He was following on the paths laid out by Homai Vyarawalla and Kulwant Roy along with others like T. S. Satyan and many others who captured moments of a nation’s evolution. After the 70s, it was Rai who led the way as the nation got ready for the many shocks that traumatised it, bombs shattered its tranquility and many groups questioned its very existence. Ringside viewer of historyEven outside the hurly burly of political happenings, Rai had his way and his method. Patience always pays, especially for a photographer for whom everything occurs in a flash, be it the crackle of gunfire, the thud of a big fall or the laugh of deception of a political leader. That readiness is important and Rai did not fail often. Even after the great leader died, Rai got the best pictures. Unforgettable is the closeup of the dead Indira Gandhi which came up on the India Today cover. But even when he had all the time, for portraits for instance, he transformed the moment. The Mother Teresa and the earlier Dalai Lama portraits with which we are familiar are examples of this. It is here that Rai developed notions of divinity. He believed that they were true revelations of the divine or god itself. “I went to see her (Mother Teresa) last Sunday and as she appeared, she looked drenched in His glory glowing in a pure light around her. I had my Darshan of Him as well through her,” he wrote in the introduction to the pictures. “Spirituality is an intrinsic and essential part of Rai’s life and practice,” the curators of his lifetime show, Roobina Karode and Devika Daulet Singh wrote. In a larger sense, it can be said that Rai chronicled the democratisation of the country as it grew and learnt and protested and created and destroyed and killed and redeemed. That is a photographer’s job. As a person entrusted to be a ringside viewer of history, Rai seldom failed. Watching him work, many photographers learnt, admired, grew and some even bettered him.The end of a friendshipRaghu was the photo editor during my days in The Indian Express. We became good friends and he often dropped into the cabin which I shared with his ex wife, Usha Rai, who wrote the text of some of his books including the Taj Mahal. Later, however, Raghu took offence to a critical review of his book on Mother Teresa which I published in India Today, where I was books editor at the time, and the friendship cracked. The writer had pointed out that Rai’s second book on Mother Teresa was just a commercial effort made up on pictures unused in his first book. Prashant Panjiar, who was to become one of India’s leading news photographers, was part of a fantastic team in India Today led by Raghu Rai and Bhawan Singh. He was working on a self-financed book on the dacoits of Chambal Valley. In his book titled That Which Is Unseen, Prashant narrated the story of one of his early pictures. “We were travelling through Mainpuri when alleged dacoits again massacred 10 dalits in the village of Sadhupur on the night of 30 December. 1981. The next morning we headed for the village…That night New Year’s Eve, I travelled with the dead bodies to the morgue of the district hospital for the post mortem . Early morning on New Year’s Day I was back in the village to witness the women quietly grieving over their loved ones and stayed until the mass funeral late in the evening.” Chaitanya Kalbag, who reported on the massacre, showed Prasanth’s photographs to Rai who was photo editor in India today. “Rai took me into the dark room to hand print each picture himself,” he said. India Today ran the story of the massacre as a photo essay with the heading “Slaughter Without End”. Rai encouraged many young photographers. Many others who did not work with him also swear by him. It can be said that Raghu Rai taught an entire generation how to see, how to gaze and how to create beauty where none existed. His pictures will hang on many walls, in many texts and books, not just as decoration or beauty but as history itself.Binoo John’s study of Indian news photography ‘All in a Flash: News photography in India’ is due to be released.