‘Long before we named the gods, we painted animals’: There’s a new book of Raghu Rai’s animal photos

Animals is a book that brings Raghu Rai’s animal photographs to a wider audience. The images come from his travels across the country and form a vast archive. The book treats photography as more than record-keeping. Each picture becomes a statement and a lesson about animals and human feeling.

The project began when the writer looked through Rai’s evocative images and immediately felt they should be accessible to the world. Rai’s photographs show animals he met and lensed during his travels. Together, they follow an ancient thread linking people with everything that crawls, soars, prowls, and sings.

The book also places these photographs within the long history of animal art. From Chauvet’s cave horses to sacred animals in many cultures, animals have carried deep meanings. Animals therefore offers not just pictures, but a renewed way to see creatures as living presences rather than objects of use or decoration.

Raghu Rai is a photographer whose work the writer has known and followed for more than half a century. The article presents him as someone who sees what most people miss. His photographs are not simply technical records. They reveal attention, trust, humour, and feeling.

His distinctive approach rests on several qualities. He takes himself seriously enough to trust his eyes, yet keeps a sense of humour. He also shows enormous empathy for his subjects. These qualities appear especially strongly in his vast archive of animals met and photographed during travels across the country.

That combination changes how viewers meet the animals. They are not reduced to specimens or decorations. Rai’s photographs make them feel present and significant. The article suggests that this is why the images became the foundation for Animals: they invite viewers to notice creatures closely and reconsider the relationship between human beings and the living world.

The human tradition of depicting animals reaches back more than 30,000 years. The article points to the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave in France, whose paintings remained untouched for over 30,000 years. These works show wild horses, lions, and mammoths in charcoal and simple lines.

Other early examples appear on cave walls at Chauvet, Altamira, and Bhimbetka. They include horses, bison, stags, and lions. The article says these images were not merely decorative. They were invocations, perhaps even prayers, expressing a partnership between human beings and other species.

This history matters because it shows that animal art began before the modern idea of “nature.” The people who made the Chauvet images lived in harmony with these creatures, within what the article calls “one breath, one world.” Animal depiction therefore began as a way of honouring, engaging with, and trying to understand the living world.

Different cultures give animals active roles in myth, religion, and ideas about death. They may guide souls, carry messages, protect people, bring rain, or connect earthly and divine worlds. The article presents animals as participants in sacred stories, not background figures.

Examples span many regions. The Yakuts believed the soul travelled on horseback to the afterlife. In Egypt, jackal-headed Anubis led souls through the journey after death. Islam speaks of Buraq carrying the Prophet from Mecca to Jerusalem. Among the Hopi, the hummingbird is called upon to pray for rain, while the Andean condor bridges earthly and divine realms.

Other traditions include Ganesha’s elephant form, Hanuman’s monkey heart, Inanna’s lion, and the Japanese fox shapeshifter. The Chinese zodiac links animals with temperament and destiny. These examples show a shared pattern: animals explain mysteries, connect dimensions, and express cultural beliefs about life, death, and the sacred.

Animals in art are more than symbols or metaphors because the article treats them as living truths. A symbol stands for an idea, while a metaphor compares one thing with another. Animals exceed both roles. Their bodies, movements, and presence carry meanings that cannot be fully controlled by human language.

The article gives artistic examples. A stag standing in fog expresses not only grace but also grief. A crow’s wing captured in motion becomes memory taking form. These works do not turn animals into passive signs. Instead, the animals remain agents that can awaken something deeper in the viewer.

This idea matters because it changes how animal art is understood. Cave paintings, sculptures, photographs, and drawings become encounters rather than decorations. They open a doorway into something older than memory and larger than logic. By looking closely, people may recover a sense of connection with creatures they have tried to classify or control.

When animals are treated mainly as objects for use, display, or decoration, the relationship between humans and animals becomes narrower. The article says animals are caged in zoos and farms, but also in the static of human minds. People begin to classify them as objects rather than recognise them as living beings.

That reduction does not fully succeed. Animals continue to resist it in wild corners, dreams, and art. A look exchanged with a stray dog or the cry of an unnamed bird can create an unnameable stirring. Such moments break through the categories people use to control or simplify animal life.

The consequence is both distance and possible awakening. Modern people have drifted far from the older reality of “one breath, one world.” Yet art can crack the shell of certainty. By restoring attention and empathy, it may help people see animals as active presences and reconsider how they live alongside them.

The history of animal art reveals that humans have long understood themselves through their relationship with other species. Early images were not simply decoration. They honoured animals and may have served as invocations or prayers. This suggests that people saw themselves as participants in a shared world, not as beings completely separate from nature.

The Chauvet paintings show wild horses, lions, and mammoths made by people who lived in harmony with these creatures. Across myths, animals become guides, messengers, protectors, and bridges between worlds. Their roles help humans think about breath, blood, wind, destiny, death, and the sacred.

The article contrasts that older connection with the present, where animals are often treated as objects of use or display. Animal art can still reopen the relationship. By making people notice animals as active, mysterious beings, it may recover a sense of partnership and challenge the certainty that humans stand outside the natural world.