From the scowl of a Calcutta street kid to the prayer-locked, wrinkled face and hands of Mother Theresa; from the quiet orange of a Taj Mahal sunrise to the bustle of a Delhi bazaar -- it seems the full breadth of India's people and places live in the photographs of Raghu Rai.
Rai, 58, is an ex-photojournalist whose work has appeared in magazines such as Time, The New Yorker, Paris Match and National Geographic. Quite probably India's greatest ever photographer, he is a longtime member of Magnum Group, the world's most prestigious photo cooperative. "India -- A Retrospective" is Rai doing what he does best, in fact what he does almost exclusively: photographing his homeland. The exhibition, now on at the spacious Bunkamura Museum in Shibuya, comprises some 200 black-and-white and color photographs taken over the last 35 years.
The show is organized around themes such as Holy River, People and Life, Street Spaces and so on. This nicely groups pictures around different facets of India but also gives the viewer a sense of how enduring traditions are in the world's second-most populous nation. It can be difficult, for example, to discern many differences between the dress of people in a picture taken in the 1960s and that seen in an adjacent work from the 1990s; and while there are more automobiles in the more recent photographs, the ox- and donkey-drawn carriages of yesteryear still fill Indian streets.