World Photography Day 2025: Looking At India Through Five Iconic Viewfinders
On World Photography Day, we are leafing through the works of photographers who don't just take technically excellent shots, but create their own worlds.
Published : August 19, 2025 at 12:29 PM IST
The funny thing about photography is that everyone thinks they can do it. We’ve all been guilty of it — whipping out our phones to catch a sunset, a plate of food, or a cat doing something. Yet, every so often, you stumble across a photograph that makes you stop mid-scroll. It’s not only a photo but a window. It opens up a way of seeing that you hadn’t considered before.
On World Photography Day, we are leafing through the works of India’s most iconic photographers. Not the ones who just take technically excellent shots, but the ones who create worlds, who make you feel like you’ve walked into the frame and can hear the background hum. Five of them in particular have done just that.
Raghu Rai: The Witness Of India
If India had a collective memory bank, Raghu Rai would be its custodian. A protégé of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Rai has spent decades photographing everything from Indira Gandhi’s funeral to the dignity of anonymous villagers. His pictures are empathetic. Look at his images of the Bhopal Gas Tragedy victims: stark, haunting, yet full of humanity. He doesn’t flinch from suffering, but he doesn’t sensationalize it either. That balance (unsparing yet respectful) is what makes Rai iconic. He shows India in its contradictions: chaotic, spiritual, raw, beautiful.
Dayanita Singh: The Architect Of Memory
Singh insists she is not just a photographer, but a bookmaker. Which sounds pretentious until you see her work, and then it suddenly makes sense. Her photo-books — Myself Mona Ahmed, Museum of Chance, Go Away Closer — are like portable museums. They’re fragmented, elliptical, and poetic. Singh takes photographs of rooms, objects, archives, and somehow manages to capture loneliness, memory, and time itself. If Rai is the chronicler of public India, Singh is the curator of its private, unspoken corners.
Gauri Gill: The Listener With A Lens
Gill is perhaps the most “un-photographer” of photographers. She doesn’t chase glamour or headlines. Instead, she works slowly, collaboratively, often over years, with rural communities in Rajasthan and beyond. Her series Notes from the Desert and Acts of Appearance are exercises in empathy. She lets her subjects guide the narrative: villagers wearing papier-mâché masks, farmers caught in moments of both banality and resilience. What makes Gill iconic is precisely this refusal to dominate the story. She listens, then translates listening into images.
Raghubir Singh: The Painter of Colour
When Westerners thought of India, they imagined dust and sepia. Then along came Raghubir Singh, who took colour photography (long dismissed as frivolous in “serious” circles) and made it lyrical. His photographs are explosions of hues: a woman in a bright sari stepping into a flooded street, reflections of neon lights in puddles, the endless layering of Indian life in blues, yellows, and reds. His work is both modernist and desi, showing how colour is not only decorative but also structural. Without him, the visual vocabulary of India might still be monochrome.
Sooni Taraporevala: The Storyteller Across Mediums
Sooni Taraporevala is a photographer who also happens to be a screenwriter (Salaam Bombay!, The Namesake). Her photographs of Bombay’s Parsi community, her portraits of severyday city life, are inherently narrative. They feel like stills from a film you wish existed. In her work, you sense characters, plot, drama, even humour. What makes her iconic is this ability to see not just the image, but the story behind it. Her lens is affectionate, curious, and cinematic.
What ties these five together is not technique (they’re wildly different) but intent. They don’t chase virality; they pursue truth. After all, photography, at its best, is not about the camera, the megapixels, or the clever filter. It’s about seeing... patiently, attentively, with heart.
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