Who’s the photographer?

Does it matter? All the ‘photographers’ are actually in the photo. It feels like an image that simply came to be, through the sheer force of photography’s will.

All the photographers. The men who many consider made the vision of India possible. The man in the centre is Deepak Puri, the legendary photo editor and manager of Time-Life News Service’s South Asia bureau; A man whom Pico Iyer noted in the acknowledgement of his book, The Open Road, as holding up ‘much of the Time-Life empire, and I sometimes suspect, most of India single-handedly’.

A cursory internet search with this image brings up an article from 2016, in a magazine with a wonderfully apt title – Man’s World. Sometimes research really does make me chuckle :). In the article, this photograph is accompanied by a more elaborate caption:

Puri (in the middle with turban) at his son’s wedding in February 2009, with well-known photographers Prashant Panjiar, Jim Nachtwey, Raghu Rai and Sebastião Salgado (from left). Photograph by Rakesh Sahai.

All the photographers are in the photo, representing the ‘golden age’ of photojournalism. A bygone era when iconic photographs made any story – whether on war or famine, or festivals or royalty memorable and captivating. When news organisations had the budgets and the clout to fly (mostly white – let’s face it), photographers around the world, and aided them (significantly, if we consider Deepak Puri) in covering any and all stories, of any and all people. It was a condensing of the world, one image at a time. Single-handedly depicting all the world’s stories.

Of course, they are some of the most beautiful photographs ever made.

And they make me wonder, often, about photography’s role as an ornament.

Rakesh Sahai was a New Delhi-based photographer, mostly known for his work photographing wildlife.

It makes sense to me that Sahai was a good wildlife photographer. Here, he seems to have captured beautifully the essence of what made photojournalism in its ‘heyday’ feel so much like a pack (or a club) – with its joyous, laughing men, arms interlinked, safe in the knowledge that their place in the world was secure, firmly believing that they would continue to present to the world its own image; And that the world would gladly receive it, and hold it up as an Icon.

Ah well.