The 2027 Pirelli Calendar Will Feature an All-Indian Cast of Women
The 2027 Pirelli Calendar features an all-Indian cast of women and celebrates the legacy of the country’s most celebrated photographer Raghu Rai.
Raghu Rai, a pioneer of photojournalism in India who spent more than five decades documenting the country, died in April at the age of 83. For the 2027 Pirelli Calendar, photographers Sølve Sundsbø and Raghu’s daughter Avani Rai brought to life an India-focused project that honors the late photographer’s vision.
The 2027 Pirelli calendar is the first to be shot entirely in India. It also features an all-Indian cast of women such as Bhavitha Mandava, Padma Lakshmi, Anoushka Shankar, and Freida Pinto.
Supermodel Mandava tells The Guardian that she initially had reservations because of the Pirelli calendar’s history of featuring nudity and questioned how it would be received in India’s more conservative culture. But she praised Pirelli’s decision to celebrate India’s “beauty and diversity”.
“I’ll be honest I wasn’t very enthusiastic about the past eroticism of the Pirelli calendar and those associations,” she tells the news outlet. “But I’m so glad, they have actively made an effort for me to feel like I belong.”
An Homage to Raghu Rai
The project was originally planned as a collaboration between Raghu and Norwegian photographer Sundsbø, but Raghu died in April before the concept for the calendar was fully developed.
Following his death, Raghu’s photographer daughter Avani stepped in to continue his contribution. According to a Pirelli press release, Avani acknowledged that taking on the project and carrying forward her father’s legacy was a challenging responsibility. While the calendar was initially intended to be shot in a studio setting, Avani decided to move the project outdoors, capturing scenes across Old Delhi in locations her father had documented throughout his career, including Kinari Bazar and Yamuna Ghat.
“He belonged to the streets,” Avani says. “So I took the idea he was working on into the streets and to the people he had photographed all his life.”
Avani chose photographs taken by her father and revisited the locations where they were originally captured. Rather than attempting to replicate the scenes, she positioned the original photographs within each setting and photographed them alongside the present-day surroundings, creating a dialogue between the past and the present.
“I stand back in the spiritual, actual and literal sense. I stand behind him,” she explains. “I frame him, his work and the reality that exists 30, 40, or 50 years later. ”
The annual trade calendar is published by the Milan-based tire manufacturer Pirelli. It was first published in 1964 and featured photographs by Robert Freeman, who is known for his images of The Beatles. The calendar has evolved since its debut edition. For the first 10 years, the calendar only included photographs of fully clothed women, but began to shift to a more risqué feel, with a heavy emphasis on nudity. However, the historic emphasis on sensual images of women in various states of undress has toned down as times have shifted.
