It was an experience to watch the 55-minute documentary film, An Unframed Portrait, directed by Avani Rai, daughter of legendary photographer, Raghu Rai who passed away, aged 83 years, in New Delhi, on April 26. The screening was on the terrace of the Press Club in Mumbai on Saturday, May 9 followed by a lively interaction between the directors, Avani in Delhi via zoom with the audience in Mumbai.
Avani Rai did not actually set out to make a film about her father. What she wanted was to get to know him better by observing him on one of his photo trips. In the film that she ended up making anyway, father and daughter travel together to Kashmir, where political unrest prevails and violence is commonplace. They photograph their surroundings and each other, in the meantime reflecting on their lives, politics and his craft, which is richly illustrated with material from Raghu Rai’s archive.
The elder Rai started taking photos in the 1960s, and has now published more than 50 books. He is best known for his powerful series on the aftermath of the Bhopal toxic gas tragedy in 1984, portraits of Mother Teresa and Indira Gandhi.
Avani films and photographs her father as he works—and as he instructs her on viewpoints and framing. In the process, the film becomes a portrait not only of a passionate photographer, but also of a father-daughter relationship
Born in Jhang, British India (now in Pakistan), Rai was the youngest of four siblings. His family moved to Delhi after Partition in 1947, and he followed his father into civil engineering before a chance encounter with a donkey changed the course of his life. Accompanying his elder brother, the photojournalist S Paul, he became fixated on a stray donkey caught in a shaft of light and spent hours trying to frame it. The resulting photograph, made with a borrowed camera, was later published in the Times, London. Rai described the experience as his first sense of “the magic of holding a moment”, as the Guardian wrote in it’s obituary on his passing.
I could also connect with Raghu Rai in another way, his first wife Usha Rai was the well-known journalist and a colleague in the Time of India (where I worked for several years). She was also a fellow student at the Jesuit SFS College in Nagpur around 1960.
Prominent photographer Mukesh Parpiani and Neeraj recalled their association with Rai at the Press Club last Saturday. Avani said in response to questions that an exhibition of Rai’s works would be held in Mumbai soon. As Harish Nambiar of the Press club’s film group mentioned Rai reminded one of the works of Cartier-Bresson and Selgado.
The day before Gandhi’s assassination, Cartier-Bresson photographed the leader, who had been fasting to call for an end to the violence over the India-Pakistan partition, as he was physically—and perhaps emotionally—supported by his nieces. Cartier-Bresson returned the next day to interview Gandhi about the fast. On January 30, 1948, hours after their conversation, Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu ‘nationalist’, Nathuram Godse. In the aftermath, Cartier-Bresson returned once again to Birla House to document Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s announcement of Gandhi’s death. Cartier-Bresson’s quiet pictures of Gandhi’s body lying in state led to a commission from Life magazine to document the funeral (the February 16, 1948 issue included nine of Cartier-Bresson’s photographs, compared to only five by Margaret Bourke-White, despite her close relationship to the magazine.)
Rai also reminds one of the renowned Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado, who died in 2025 at age 81, Salgado, who in his lifetime produced more than 500,000 images while meticulously documenting every continent on Earth and many of the major geopolitical events since the second world war, will be remembered as one of the world’s most prodigious and relentlessly empathetic chroniclers of the human condition.
The Press club terrace overlooking Azad Maidan is one of the best spaces in Mumbai for a meeting and discussion. A most pleasant aspect of the venue is the lawn of the Museum flanked by the garden of the David Sassoon library on the other side of the road. We need more such open spaces that function so much better than closed spaces with air-conditioning.
Note: The Film Study Group (FSB) of the Mumbai Press Club paused its series of war movies to present Avani Rai’s intimate portrayal of her legendary father. Presented from a lens as a daughter of a celebrated father, the documentary brings an immediate urgency to the narrative that traces her father’s fraught journey from Pre Partition India and his steady, steely rise as photographer of international eminence.
(The author is a veteran writer formerly with The Times of India group, Mumbai.)
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