Raghu Rai

In His Holiness, award-winning photographer Raghu Rai has captured the Dalai Lama’s journey in India since exile from Tibet in 1959. Rai presents an intimate photographic portrayal of the life of one of the most popular twentieth-century spiritual leaders.

Since the fourteenth Dalai Lama’s forced exile from Tibet in 1959, Raghu Rai, one of the world’s most famous photographers, has documented his life in India. Now leading Tibetan Buddhists from afar, His Holiness is respected around the world as a pillar of peace and moral strength while he remains separated from his country. Enhanced by historical commentary and archival photos of the Dalai Lama and Tibet, Rai’s work follows the spiritual leader’s journey from exile through his present worldwide influence in a stunning and intimate photo series.

Born to a peasant family in 1935, Lhamo Thondup was recognized at age two as the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama and became the temporal leader of Tibet at age fifteen. In 1959, he was forced into exile in India after the Chinese military occupation of Tibet. Since 1960, he has resided in Dharamsala, aptly known as “Little Lhasa,” the seat of the Tibetan government-in-exile.

Award-wining photographer Raghu Rai has spent over four decades charting the changing face of India. Photographing subjects from Indira Gandhi and Mother Teresa to the victims of Bhopal, he is one of the most prominent and well-known visual chroniclers of the country. In His Holiness, Raghu Rai has captured the journey of the Dalai Lama in India, presenting an intimate photographic portrayal of the life of one of the most popular twentieth-century spiritual leaders, the Dalai Lama.… (plus d'informations)

The idea for this book germinated when a pictorial feature, shot by Padma Shree photographer Raghu Rai, on a day in the life of Indira Gandhi appeared in JS magazine in June, 1972.
The enthusiastic response to the feature suggested the possibility of its expansion to book form. As the book slowly took shape, with the photographer focusing on the domestic details and the political saga of Mrs. Gandhi's life, someone remarked that the Prime Minister lives a normal lifetime in a single day, and so the title was born.
The book is not just another biography illustrated with official photographs. It is rather a sensitive unfolding of a day in the life of a remarkable woman, and of necessity a day that indulges artistic license to span many monumental and ordinary days in order to project an image of the unusually busy and varied life that Mrs. Gandhi leads.
The result is a fresh and unique look at the woman who manages the affairs of a vast nation at this present time. It is intended as a contemporary and human study rather than a political one, as a portrait in personality rather than an exhaustive document of minutiae: the point being not whether Mrs. Gandhi eats two eggs for breakfast or whether she prefers orange to green, but how she is able to remain human in a job that requires superhuman qualifications and stamina.… (plus d'informations)