French Ambassador looks at India, Raghu Rai at France, in black, white and grey

In black-and-white photos spanning France (Rai’s photographs, taken in 2019) and India (Lenain’s artistic journey through a country hit by the pandemic yet vibrant in its plurality and chaos of ‘jugaad’).

“Black-and-white was not an easy choice to represent a country flooded with the fantastic colours,” says Lenain. But he chose to go without colour, because “ it creates an obligation to divine the forms that are hidden behind the noisy effervescence of the streets.”

‘Paris 1998’. Copyright Raghu Rai

Rai, too, prefers the stark truth that emerges with the medium. “Black-and-white photos can silence the noise of colour,” he says.

Despite the lack of colour, or perhaps because of it, Lenain’s shots of India during the pandemic’s devastating second wave, his celebration of the country as a living thing, even its chaos, manage to capture the sheer scale of its diversity.

“As anybody living in India at the time I was deeply moved by the scale of the tragedy. Some of my staff, friends, and acquaintances lost their lives,” says Lenain about what moved him to capture the tragedy as it unfolded.

“I toured the city after work. The land adjacent to crematoriums, often car parks, were requisitioned to build makeshift pyres:

lined up in perfect geometry were dozens of rectangles of earth and ashes, demarcated by a simple edge of uncemented bricks, so close together that when cremations were at their peak, the heat made it impossible to walk. And just outside, along the pavements, logs lay piled up for hundreds of metres – preparations for the next day’s battle. In Muslim cemeteries, the sections demarcated for Covid victims, created with shovels, stood slightly apart. There was the same outburst of grief everywhere.”

Lenain’s portraits of people at the height of their grief, as they bury and cremate their loved ones remind us of the humanity of those who, without such records, may have just become another part of Covid statistics.

He manages to portray scale — with a wide-angle, heavily-contrasted photograph of the many, constantly burning pyres at a Delhi crematorium. And then, he moves in, to the faces — often emotionally fatigued and resigned — of those lighting the pyres and digging the graves.

While in In India, the diplomat turned a chronicler of crises, Rai – whose photographs have been emblematic of the biggest headlines of contemporary India – pictures an homage to France.

“Photographing France, for me, was like a pilgrimage,” he says. “It’s the birthplace of the form, and Paris is one of the most photographed cities in the world. Marc Riboud, Henri Cartier-Bresson… so many photographers I admire have captured the city.”

So in From France, a girl poses for a portrait for a street artist, as Rai photographs the process, capturing a first-world millennial partaking in an analogue joy.

A baker, a homeless person, the bodies and smiles of a Pride Parade, the pathos of old artists, Rai’s France is not the pale shadow of itself that many travellers now see — a city that is in love with its own past, a museum gift shop of sorts. In Rai’s eyes, Paris is a city of the young (though there are portraits of artists of every age, vintage and varying degrees of renown), the resplendent queer community and the hopeful.

Lenain’s portraits of India’s youth, in contrast, show joy, dignity and despair in equal measure. “His sensibilities, especially for someone who isn’t a professional, are remarkable,” says Rai of Lenain. “The portrait of the two young women in burqas captures a joy inside (Delhi’s) Jama Masjid that I haven’t seen before; the portrait of the sweeper in Jaipur is wonderfully tender.”

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The idea for the book (published by the Raghu Rai foundation and selected photographs from it are being exhibited at Alliance française, Delhi till May 26), came about at a dinner at the French Embassy in Delhi in Rai’s honour after he was honoured as the first Laureate Photographer of Magnum Photos.

“The ambassador asked if I would see his photos and I could see immediately that he was very passionate… He floated the idea for this book and over the next few months and years, I worked with him and the book is the result,” says Rai.

Many of the diplomat’s photographs are around themes that can be interpreted politically – a discarded statue of Hanuman on a river bed, crematoriums and graveyards during Covid, the “Kafkaesque” nature of how the country functions. Lenain, though, insists his chronicle isn’t political: “There are two different worlds in my life: the world of politics, that can be from time to time harsh and cruel… and the world of art – infinite, where one tries to infuse a little dose of beauty. I enjoy tremendously the freedom that photography provides.”