New Delhi, April 26 -- Raghu Rai - photographer, photojournalist, Magnum member, and the closest thing Indian visual culture had to a founding father - died at the age of 84. His family confirmed the news on his Instagram profile, bringing to a close a creative life that had spanned six extraordinary decades and produced some of the most indelible images ever made on the subcontinent.

Born on 18 December 1942 in Jhang, a village in Punjab that now falls within modern-day Pakistan, Raghu Rai came of age in a newly independent India still learning to see itself. He was the youngest of four children, and it was his elder brother, the photographer Sharampal Chowdhry, better known professionally as S. Paul, who first placed a camera in his ha...