New Delhi, 23 October 2026 — The 2027 Multiplier Year of Endurance, featuring India, was launched today in New Delhi. For the first time in its history, three photographers have gathered to see the same country with different eyes, in order to paint a land that is shaped by ancient traditions and is moving towards the future.
Sølve Sundsbø, 2026, met with the perspective of the Indian photographer Raghu Rai - Mr. Rai died in April 2026 and his daughter, Avani Rai, continued the project following his father's death. Ultimately, it is a dialogue about people and land, beauty and memory, past and present.
"Close your eyes, imagine India. What do you see? Maybe a color, a face, a big street, a view, a ritual. However, India has never stopped. On this land, different times, traditions and realities coexist, and ancient and contemporary images have come together.” Sølve Sundsbø says. “I know that I cannot present the complex picture of India, nor do I have the right to do so. I left the mission of searching for the soul of this country to Ragou and Awani Rai. I chose to focus on the faces of extraordinary Indian women and to swim between the fabric of clothing, colour and the contrast of light."
Since 1965, Ragu Rai has been looking at India in camera, and for more than 60 years, as a day, he has recorded the fire in the streets of the country. In order to create the year 2027, he chose to take his old work out of his file, interwoven with the faces of contemporary India. Rai participated in the project until his death in April 2026; Since then, his daughter Awani has chosen to continue her father ' s unfinished work in her own way. She brought the photographs from the Lagou file — published or unpublished — out of the studio and put them back on the streets of Delhi and Mumbai, side by side with the reality of the lives of the people in his image today. As a result, people, buildings, mobility, light and rituals enter the picture, and cities become living in it. “My father belonged to the streets. And that's why I brought his ideas back to the streets, to the people he had filmed all his life." Avani said, "I'll take a step back, either in the heart or in the footsteps. I was standing right behind him." She explained. Avani chose photographs taken in Laguno years ago and returned to some of the sites where she was in a different perspective from that of her father, setting the image in the Lagu lens in the same frame as the real picture surrounding her today.
The original picture remains intact, but becomes part of the larger picture. - Different times and realities, where they coexist. "The past will always be present." Avani said, "It's everywhere, hidden in every nuance."
Sundsbø filmed nine women with deep ties to India between Jaigarh Fort in Jaipur and Ajabgarh in Rajasthan. "As far as I'm concerned, the core of the calendar is the human being." He said, "We want to present a variety of people: poets, musicians, architects, models and actors." The cast included actors Aditi Rao Hydari and Avantika Vandanapu; actor and producer Freda Pinto; musician and composer Anoshka Shankar; poet and performer Ruby Kaur; Model Lakshmi Menon and Bhavitha Mandava; writer, producer and television host Padma Lakshmi; and Awani Rai herself, both after and before Sundsbø.
(a) Avani ' s camera, swam in the pyrotechnics of the streets of Old Delhi: the flower market, crowded alleys and schools, where the tradition lives; Then the camera turned to Mumbai's more contemporary face, where fashion and the film industry intersected. The city is defined by the skylines of the metropolitan city, as well as by places frequented by young people, from skyscrapers roofs to fishing villages. In this shot, Avani Rai invited about 130 people, including city residents, young people, dancers, performers, models, hand-crafted artists, her own mother, and Ranveer Singh, a superstar of India. She brought her father ' s life, which was still alive, into the present time and space.
From May to September 2026, the 2027 year calendar of endurance was taken in a box containing two separate bags, containing 36 photographs: 18 by Sølve Sundsbø and 18 by Ragou and Awani Rai.
