A father's legacy, a daughter's lens: How Avani Rai completed Raghu Rai's Pirelli calendar

Time was almost a subject in iconic photographer Raghu Rai’s images. He played with it, closely observed its movements and was captivated by how no one was immune to it. This fascination with time can be observed in his works like ‘Confessions of a Wall’, the black-and-white photo series he did between 1973 and 1977, in which he trained his lens on a wall that stretched between Daryaganj and Jama Masjid in Old Delhi. Time tip-toed across the wall in the form of school boys jubilantly returning home and men with weary expressions posing against large tapestries. The wall had stories to tell and Raghu patiently listened with his camera for four years. But the story did not end there. After his death in April, his daughter Avani returned to the wall for Pirelli’s 2027 calendar, juxtaposing her father’s photographs against it. The past and the present coalesced into the same frame, captured through the lenses of a father and daughter separated by time and technique.  

This is not the first time that the two are telling the same story through two different lenses, with time playing the mediator. In the aftermath of the Bhopal gas tragedy in 1984, Raghu captured some of the most heart-rending images. His picture, ‘Burial of an Unknown Child’, became seared into the consciousness of the nation. It showed a father burying his infant, his hand lovingly brushing aside the dirt from the child’s forehead. Three decades later in 2014, Avani visited the site to capture the impact of the disaster on third- and fourth-generation victims. She not only documented its lasting human cost, but also became the torch-bearer of her father’s legacy, finishing the story that he had begun telling. Time was no longer something passive, moving along unnoticed, invisible. By documenting its passing, father and daughter had made it alive, active and bound within the frames of their photographs. “Bhopal was my father’s favourite project of mine,” says Avani, 34. “He was very proud of it.”

Just like the Bhopal project, Pirelli was not a collaboration between the two; it was a continuation of one by the other. For the first time in more than 60 years, the Pirelli calendar, commonly known as The Cal, was shot entirely in India. Pirelli wanted to document the unseen side of the country, shorn of exoticisation or exaggeration. For this, it commissioned two photographers—Raghu and SØlve SundsbØ from Norway. After Raghu’s death, Avani completed what he began. SundsbØ’s vision aligned more closely with what Pirelli is traditionally known for—glamorous photographs of Indian trailblazers like Aditi Rao Hydari, Padma Lakshmi, Freida Pinto and Anoushka Shankar shot in beautiful locales across Rajasthan, from Jaigarh Fort to Ajabgarh.

Raghu, on the other hand, envisioned an insider perspective of the country that he had spent 60 years documenting. His original idea was to layer his unpublished archive images with new studio portraits, juxtaposing the past with the present. Avani embraced the idea but took it to the streets of Old Delhi, which had played muse to her father for so many years. She retraced his steps, photographing his images in the exact places where he had shot them years ago. In her photographs, Old Delhi comes alive in all the vigour and vibrancy of its street performers, dancers, artisans and musicians. Time has passed, the cast of original characters in Raghu’s photographs has changed, but the stories told by both father and daughter telescope into one—of a country that dances to its own music, whose laughter rings out from its gullies, and whose celebrations outlast the day.

Her father, says Avani, was her first audience. So, the grief of losing him and not being able to discuss her photography with him was heavy. The vacuum made her wonder if she could ever take up the camera again. It was while she was questioning her calling that Pirelli offered her the calendar and an opportunity to continue her father’s work. “I can’t ever do what he did,” she says. “But the one thing he gifted me with was a way of seeing. And if I gave up the camera, that is what I would be giving up. Now, my relationship with him comes alive the most when I am looking through a viewfinder. Earlier, I used to look at myself as his daughter, trying to prove myself to him. But now, I see him beside me. I feel like my father and I are one entity.”

Avani got her first camera when she was around five years old—a Canon red-and-white which she feels she was given so that she wouldn’t tamper with her father’s. Her photography journey started then. But in her childhood, she was more in front than behind the camera. “My father photographed me so much that now I am not sure whether my memories of childhood are real or what I’ve pieced together from the photographs,” she laughs. “So I’ve experienced my childhood mostly through imagery.” Some of her favourite photographs of herself shot by her father are those at his farm near Delhi, which she loved visiting. She has memories of sleeping on the bulldozer, looking for ladybirds on the ground and eating soil. “I was always this dirty child who loved nature more than dolls and Barbies,” she says. “And my father loved it.”

And how does she feel about the pressure of photographing for Pirelli? After all, this is the calendar that has featured the work of legendary photographers like Steve McCurry, Tim Walker, Karl Lagerfeld, Peter Lindbergh and Richard Avedon. Each of them brought their distinct flavour to the calendar. Lagerfeld, for example, themed his 2011 calendar on Greek mythology, with models playing Greek gods and actor Julianne Moore playing Hera, the queen of the gods. Pirelli shook off its reputation for sexual objectification of women with its 2016 calendar shot by Annie Leibowitz, which celebrated iconic women from Serena Williams and Amy Schumer to Yoko Ono and Patti Smith. Walker created a surreal, fairy-tale like ‘Alice in Wonderland’-themed calendar in 2018.  

Avani says she did not feel overwhelmed by the roster of famous photographers before her. “It is something my father used to tell me,” she says. “He told me to acknowledge and appreciate the work of others, but to never let it be a burden that does not let you function as yourself. This project was emotional for me, and I just tried to do it with sincerity and honesty.”