Posted on 19 August 2026:
World Photography Day 2026 in Guwahati: ADTU Photography Club to Screen “Raghu Rai: Hearing Through the Eyes” in Collaboration with NFDC
World Photography Day, celebrated this 19th August, arrives in Guwahati this year carrying exactly that weight. At Assam down town University, the ADTU Photography Club has chosen not a celebration of the camera in the abstract, but a tribute to the man many considered its conscience in India — Raghu Rai.
The occasion is the screening of Raghu Rai: Hearing Through the Eyes, a documentary produced by the Films Division of India in collaboration with NFDC, that turns its lens inward on the photographer who spent sixty years turning his lens outward on India. Directed by Suvendu Chatterjee, the film moves through Rai’s photographs, his personal reflections, and the quiet philosophy that shaped his frames — offering not a biography so much as a portrait assembled the way Rai himself might have assembled one: image by image, silence by silence.
This year, the screening carries an added, unspoken poignancy. Raghu Rai passed away in April 2026, at the age of eighty-three, closing a chapter that began with a photograph of a stubborn donkey in the early 1960s and ended with a body of work — the Bangladesh Liberation War, the Bhopal Gas Tragedy, decades of political and everyday India — that reads today like the closest thing the country has to a visual memory. To watch this film now, on the very day the world sets aside to honour photography, is to sit not just with his images but with the shape of an era that has just come to a close.
Presiding over the occasion as Chief Guest is Charu Kamal Hazarika, Director and National Film Awardee, whose own standing in Indian cinema lends the gathering a fitting gravity — a filmmaker’s tribute to a photographer’s eye, in a room full of students still learning how to hold both a camera and a question at once.
The event unfolds on 19th August 2026, from 11 AM onwards, at Auditorium 2, C Block, and is organised by the ADTU Photography Club — a fitting custodian for an afternoon that asks young image-makers in Guwahati and across Assam to pause, watch, and perhaps understand a little more about what it means to see with both the eye and the heart, exactly as Raghu Rai always insisted a true photograph demands.
Whether you arrive as a photography student, a film enthusiast, or simply someone who has ever paused before one of Rai’s frames, this screening promises an hour of quiet reckoning — a chance to witness, in his own words and images, how an engineer-turned-photographer became the man who taught India to look at itself without flinching.
Film: Raghu Rai: Hearing Through the Eyes In Collaboration With: NFDC (National Film Development Corporation)
Date: 19th August 2026 Time: 11:00 AM onwards Venue: Auditorium 2, C Block Organised By: ADTU Photography Club, Guwahati.
