New Delhi, Oct 23 (PTI) When photographer Raghu Rai was approached by the Pirelli Calendar for its 53rd edition with India as its protagonist, he wanted to bring new subjects to his studio and put them against his unpublished works of the last 50 years for the project titled “Past Forward”.
The project, which became a matter of many discussions with his photographer daughter Avani Rai before he passed away on April 26 this year, came to fruition almost the way he had intended as Avani took Raghu Rai’s works to the streets “where he belongs”.
As the 2027 Pirelli Calendar, or The Cal, launched here on Friday, Avani’s lens looked at her father’s archive frames while capturing the people and life that unfolds on the streets of India, almost as if she were standing behind him like an attentive student, or a daughter.
“He had taken his unpublished work and he was going to recreate life in a studio. But when he wasn’t physically present, I was like, ‘why would I make it here? I will take him into the streets where he belongs’. And so, his images are my backdrop. Basically, he’s standing in front of me,” Avani told PTI at the launch of the calendar.
Avani followed a deeply personal approach by taking her father’s archive photographs, both published and unpublished, out of the studio and placing them back in the streets of Delhi and Mumbai, alongside the people who live in those places today.
“The original photograph remains intact, but becomes part of a broader composition in which different times and realities coexist. The past will always continue to exist in the present. It is everywhere, in the nuances,” she said.
Her work unfolds between the atmosphere of the streets of Old Delhi – in the flower market, the crowded alleyways and a school – and the more contemporary face of Mumbai, where the fashion and film industries meet.
Avani’s lens captured around 130 people – including ordinary people, young people, dancers, performers, models, artisans, her own mother and actor Ranveer Singh.
Avani, who carried the project forward after Raghu Rai’s death, was joined by Norwegian photographer Solve Sundsbo for the calendar in a dialogue that tells a story of people and places, beauty, memory and the present day.
Sundsbo portrayed nine women with ties to India, between Jaigarh Fort in Jaipur and Ajabgarh in Alwar, Rajasthan.
Sundsbo, who last came to India in the early 90s, refrained from trying to capture the essence of India.
“I didn’t feel like I had any right to come here and even try to capture the essence of a country. I did feel comfortable with portraying women from India. Women from India in an atmosphere, in a place in India with Indian life, with Indian textures, so it is Indian in that respect,” he told PTI.
His cast includes actresses Aditi Rao Hydari and Avantika Vandanapu; actress and producer Freida Pinto; musician and composer Anoushka Shankar; poet and performer Rupi Kaur, models Lakshmi Menon and Bhavitha Mandava; author, producer and television host Padma Lakshmi; and Avani Rai herself, who appears both behind the camera and in front of Sundsbo’s lens.
He said that it was appropriate that he never had “an overarching ambition of capturing the essence of India” when “you have someone (Raghu Rai) who has all the right in the world to try to say that they have been the eyes of India since 1965”.
“So you have a wide angle perspective, you have mine very narrow scope, and they’re very wide scope. And together, I think it’s interesting, maybe more interesting with just one of us,” Sundsbo added.
Hydari, who appears in a white gown in a bed of white flowers, was in a sense of disbelief at being featured in the Pirelli Calendar.
“I am still feeling like Pirelli happened and I am pinching myself. It’s iconic. I never, ever, ever thought in my (dreams) and I am a big dreamer, she said.
The “Lust Stories” actor added that she went into the project “blind”, without the knowledge of Sundsbo’s vision for the shoot and was pleasantly surprised to find a bed of flowers for her at the set.
“I was told the day before that they were going to photograph me amongst the flowers. But I didn’t know how, what, where, or anything. I thought it was very interesting that Solve, as an incredible creative force, picked me to be in a bed of flowers, because that is something that I have a personal connection with. Fragrance is something that I connect to very deeply,” she said.
Pinto said that Sundsbo didn’t come with a preconceived notion of what India and women should look like. It was the inclusion of colours in his photos that was “an ode to the various aspects of India”.
“Everywhere you see colour. Even our food is colourful. So, embracing colour, embracing nature, with the flowers and the water, the elements… I think that was an ode to the various aspects of India that we see, but not putting us in a tight box and saying this is exactly how we have to do it,” she said.
Shot between May and September, the 2027 Pirelli Calendar, presented as a box set with two separate pockets, contains a total of 36 photographs: 18 by Sundsbo and 18 from Raghu and Avani Rai’s project. PTI MAH BK
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