Adnkronos (Adnkronos) – (From our correspondent in New Delhi, Federica Mochi) – While it's true that India can't be captured in a single image, we can at least try to give it form. This is the challenge of the 2027 Pirelli Calendar, which for its 53rd edition attempts to narrate a country of contrasts and transformations through three different perspectives and two generations of photographers.
A journey where archival photographs meet contemporary streets, poetry intertwines with memory, and India emerges in all its complexity, without ever being fully captured. For the first time, The Cal brings together the work of Norwegian photographer Sølve.
Sundsbø, already author of the 2026 edition, by the Indian photographer Raghu
Rai, who passed away last April, and his daughter Avani, who continued the project after her father's death.
“If you close your eyes and think of India, what do you see? Perhaps a color, a face, a crowded street, or a ritual. India is never a single thing. It is a country where different times, traditions, and realities coexist, where ancient and contemporary enter the same image,” explains Sundsbø. The photographer chose to focus on portraits of nine women who are Indian or have ties to India, leaving Raghu and Avani Rai the task of conveying the country's complexity through the people and spaces they inhabit.
“I didn't feel like trying to represent India in all its complexity. I didn't have the right to do so,” explains the photographer. “I chose instead to focus on portraits of extraordinary Indian women, playing with the textures of their clothes, colors, and contrasts.” There are many interpretations of The Cal 2027. Sundsbø photographed the protagonists between Jaigarh Fort in Jaipur and Ajabgarh, Rajasthan, working with light, color, fabrics, and architecture. The cast includes actresses Aditi Rao Hydari and Avantika Vandanapu, actress and producer Freida Pinto, musician and composer Anoushka Shankar, poet and performer Rupi Kaur, models Lakshmi Menon and Bhavitha Mandava, author and television host Padma Lakshmi, and Avani Rai herself, also photographed by Sundsbø. “For me, the key to the Calendar is the people,” says the photographer. “We wanted to represent a variety of characters: there are poets, musicians, architects, models, and actresses.”
Parallel to this is the work of Raghu Rai, who photographed India from 1965 for over sixty years. His idea was to bring images of the past into dialogue with the faces of the present through a series of studio portraits. After his passing, Avani chose to shift perspective without abandoning the original project: she revisited her father's photographs, both published and unpublished, and returned to the places where they were taken, in Delhi and Mumbai, inserting them into the human and urban landscape of today. "My father belonged to the streets," she says. "That's why I took the idea he was working on and brought it back to the streets, among the people he had photographed throughout his life." The original images remain intact, but everything around them changes: the streets, the buildings, the people, the lights. A meeting point between different eras, without erasing the differences. "The past will always continue to exist in the present," says Avani. "It is everywhere, in the nuances."
The work spans Old Delhi, its markets, alleyways, and the banks of the Yamuna River, all the way to contemporary Mumbai, amidst architecture, youthful locales, skyscrapers, and fishing villages. Around 130 people took part in the shots, including residents, young people, dancers, performers, models, and artisans, along with Avani's mother and Indian film star Ranveer Singh. The goal is to capture the coexistence of different worlds, often separated by just a few streets, in cities that evolve without completely losing track of their history. For Avani, continuing her father's work meant finding her own place without imitating him. "He always believed that imitation could never take you beyond the original," she says. "What he left me is something much deeper: looking at the world with an open heart, an attentive gaze, dignity and respect, and carrying on his legacy with grace." Photography, she adds, is also a way to continue to encounter him: "When I look through the lens, the world seems to slow down." It's in the waiting, in the moment when something emerges from the norm, that she rediscovers her connection with him. "He never taught me how to photograph. He taught me something much more fundamental: how to be fully present and receptive to the world around us."
The choice of India also reflects a reflection on the role of the Calendar, now in its 53rd edition. "It's not a calendar that needs to prove anything; it's a calendar that is a sign of the times as seen by the artist, in this case by artists," says Pirelli Executive Chairman Marco Tronchetti Provera. "The themes are always the quality and independence of the artist in expressing himself." India, Tronchetti Provera observes, today plays a growing role in international political and economic dynamics: "It represents a calm force that moves with an eye to the future, with its own complex rules and allows us to glimpse a future that is yet to be explored, where, yes, there are tensions, but there is a great desire for the future."
The 2027 edition, produced between May and September, comes in a slipcase with two separate pockets and contains 36 photographs: 18 by Sundsbø and 18 from the Raghu and Avani Rai project. Two journeys that don't seek to overlap but rather connect contemporary aesthetic research and the photographic memory of a country in constant evolution. Artificial intelligence, however, has no place in the Calendar. Tronchetti Provera, who calls himself an AI "addict," defends for The Cal "the human eye," made up of experience, emotion, and the ability to capture the moment. "No matter how perfect and fantastic, it will never have that level of sophistication tied to experience," he assures. No photograph can contain India, we said. But a mosaic of images, as the Pirelli Calendar demonstrates this year, can come close to its soul.
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