From the backstage of the Pirelli Calendar 2027 by Sølve Sundsbø and Raghu Rai with Avani Rai, picture by Alessandro Scotti.
A year ago, Schön! met Sølve Sundsbø fresh from shooting the 2026 Pirelli Calendar, a studio-contained, elemental and deeply conceptual project that felt like the controlled opposite of everything messy and alive. Earlier this month, the reunion in London – just a few weeks after his return from Rajasthan and the old streets of Delhi – gave him the opportunity to recount his experience on set, along with the rest of the team. As Sundsbø reunites with Pirelli for a second consecutive calendar, Schön! sits down with the photographer, alongside Avani Kaur Rai and cast member Anoushka Shankar, to discuss a project shaped as much by grief as it is by celebration.
The 2027 Pirelli Calendar arrives with a backstory that is, before a single image has been seen, deeply affecting. Raghu Rai, the Magnum photographer who devoted his career to documenting India with an intimacy no outsider could replicate and an eye that earned him comparisons to Henri Cartier-Bresson, was originally commissioned as the project’s sole author. Sadly, he passed away during its development. His daughter Avani, an internationally acclaimed photographer in her own right, earnestly stepped in to realise the vision he had already begun to shape. Pirelli chose to keep faith with the project in its original spirit, inviting Sundsbø to contribute his own perspective alongside hers.
The result is the first Pirelli Calendar in the series’ history to carry the work of three photographers: Raghu Rai in concept and in Avani’s realisation of his vision, Sundsbø in parallel. It is also the first time two photographers have worked in tandem on the same edition – each shooting independently across separate locations and weeks – and if there is a more fitting tribute to a man who spent his life documenting the multiplicity of India than to refuse a single viewpoint, it is hard to think of one.
From the backstage of the Pirelli Calendar 2027 by Sølve Sundsbø and Raghu Rai with Avani Rai, picture by Alessandro Scotti.
From the backstage of the Pirelli Calendar 2027 by Sølve Sundsbø and Raghu Rai with Avani Rai, picture by Alessandro Scotti.
“I thought it was almost like a joke at the start,” Sundsbø says, “but it turned out it was a great opportunity to do something completely different.” Different is a word he returns to more than once, and having spent last year in a studio working with light and abstraction and concept, the scale of the contrast is not lost on him. Last year’s calendar was cerebral and beautiful and controlled. This one is quite the opposite of all those things, shot at Jaigarh Fort in Jaipur, in the village streets of Alwar and Rajasthan, across the lanes of Old Delhi where Raghu Rai had walked with his camera since the 1960s, and among everyday people, street artists and faces from across India whose presence gives the project a documentary breadth that a purely fashion-world cast could not have produced. “This time it was very much like, you create a world and you photograph it, and that’s a picture,” Sundsbø explains, and you can hear in the simplicity of the description how much it meant to work that way.
The question of whether a Norwegian photographer has any right to document India is one Sundsbø had asked himself before agreeing, at length and with evident seriousness. “A white middle-aged guy coming to India and trying to do pictures – that feels wrong on so many levels,” he says, “but when they did it like this, it felt like maybe I can bring an aspect to it.” Even seemingly familiar imagery demanded careful consideration. Holi powder, for instance, has become shorthand for India in countless fashion editorials, yet Sundsbø refused to use it without understanding its cultural significance. Instead, he consulted Indian collaborators and friends throughout production, questioning whether certain colours, traditions or visual references risked becoming caricatures. “It’s fantastic to be able to do it twice,” he says of returning to the calendar, “because it gives you the possibility to show a completely different aspect altogether.”
From the backstage of the Pirelli Calendar 2027 by Sølve Sundsbø and Raghu Rai with Avani Rai, picture by Alessandro Scotti.
Not that far off in the room, Avani Rai carries something visibly heavier and more personal into the conversation. While Sundsbø’s contribution to the calendar is shaped by curiosity and careful observation, hers is inseparable from grief. “I felt blessed,” she says simply. “This is a project my father was doing, so to take something forward is only a blessing. It can’t be anything else.” After her father died, she made the decision to take his project out of the studio he had originally planned and back into the streets that defined him. “He belongs to the streets,” Rai says. “He is who he is today because he was living, breathing, smelling, feeling alive in those streets.”
Her imagery naturally enters into dialogue with his archive, shot in the spaces he documented across 50 years, including Old Delhi’s lanes and the family farm where he had planted trees from every part of India over a lifetime, rather than replicating what he would have done. One of his best-known long-term projects, ‘Confessions of a Wall’, followed the changing face of a single wall over fifty years, transforming an ordinary corner of the city into an evolving portrait of India itself. “I wanted to engage with his space, his imagery, and interact with that through my eyes. So we create a relationship where the past and the present coexist.”
From the backstage of the Pirelli Calendar 2027 by Sølve Sundsbø and Raghu Rai with Avani Rai, picture by Alessandro Scotti.
From the backstage of the Pirelli Calendar 2027 by Sølve Sundsbø and Raghu Rai with Avani Rai, picture by Alessandro Scotti.
The result is a body of work that is entirely her own and unmistakably in conversation with his – which is a more difficult thing to achieve than it sounds and which she attributes to the seven years she spent travelling with him, making a film about his practice and, in the process, finding her own photographic language through the friction of their differences. Rai has a clear idea of what her father would say if he could see the finished work. “My ‘bachu’ – my baby,” she says. “He would just open his eyes bright and say that.”
The cast across the two shoots includes a diverse range of women whose connection to India mirrors the country’s own multifaceted nature. Rupi Kaur, the internationally acclaimed poet whose work has resonated with hundreds of millions of readers, joins Padma Lakshmi, a renowned author, activist and television personality. Actresses Freida Pinto, Aditi Rao Hydari and Lakshmi Menon also feature, representing a small but significant portion of Indian cinema’s most distinctive faces across Bollywood, Tamil and Telugu productions. Chanel’s latest muse, Bhavitha Mandava, and actress Avantika Vandanapu bring the younger generation to life, showcasing those who have grown up navigating the intersection of Indian heritage and Western cultural influences. Unexpectedly, Avani Rai herself appears in the Sundsbø portion of the calendar, photographed by someone whose admiration for her father she already knew and whose approach to her as a subject she describes as “open and generous” in the way that the best portraits require.
From the backstage of the Pirelli Calendar 2027 by Sølve Sundsbø and Raghu Rai with Avani Rai, picture by Alessandro Scotti.
Cast member Anoushka Shankar is among the most articulate voices in the room about what this calendar means culturally. The sitar player, composer and producer has spent her career expanding the boundaries of Indian classical music into jazz, flamenco and electronic music. Like so many in the room, Shankar grew up knowing the publication long before imagining she might one day appear in its pages. She remembers discovering it as a teenager before Annie Leibovitz’s celebrated editions reshaped her understanding of what the calendar could become. “It was never in my frame of reference that I’d be asked to be part of it one day,” Shankar says.
What convinced her, beyond the obvious honour, was the specificity of the invitation. “If there’s a group of women and maybe not everyone knows much about my music, if you picture a sitar player, maybe you picture one thing,” she says, “and so it felt nice to know I wanted to not do that, to still do something genuine but not what people might expect.” The shoot placed her in Rajasthan in May, in a sheer, edgy Rick Owens dress. She stood in rain for most of it, continuously being hosed down by the crew during the intense heat. “It was very much about who the women themselves are,” Shankar says. “I never felt puppeteered or managed. They were taking what I was saying and making it even better.”
From the backstage of the Pirelli Calendar 2027 by Sølve Sundsbø and Raghu Rai with Avani Rai, picture by Alessandro Scotti.
Shankar’s reading of the calendar’s broader significance is worth quoting at length because she gets some valid points across. “Things that continue to have value and relevance evolve,” she says. “If Pirelli was doing exactly now what it used to in the 60s, it wouldn’t have the same relevance and purpose. The fact that it grows and changes means it can.” Shankar points to the increasing recognition of Indian craftsmanship across luxury fashion houses, where embroidery, textile techniques and artisanal traditions are finally being acknowledged not as anonymous sources of inspiration but as central contributors to contemporary design. “It’s part of an overall shift into people really understanding better India’s contribution and the inspiration it gives the world.”
The 2027 Pirelli Calendar would have been remarkable simply for bringing India to its pages in such depth. Instead, it becomes something richer: a conversation across generations, between father and daughter, insider and outsider, memory and reinvention. Raghu Rai’s vision remains its foundation, but it continues to breathe through Avani’s deeply personal response and Sundsbø’s carefully considered perspective, each complementing rather than competing with the other.
photography. courtesy of Alessandro Scotti
words. Gennaro Costanzo
