Kishor Parekh is one of India’s greatest photography legends.

News photography in India can be divided into two eras: pre-Kishor Parekh and post. In 1961, Parekh returned to India, armed with a degree in filmmaking and documentary photography from the University of Southern California. Such was his colossal presence that he had a radical impact from the very onset, introducing multi-column photos, full-page photo essays, and bylines for photographers, all of which were unseen in the Indian media until then. Never before had a photographer so altered the visual landscape of newsprint in India.

Beyond journalism, Parekh straddled the worlds of contemporary, commercial, documentary and art with fluid finesse. His work was groundbreaking, his contemporary approach, radical. His book Bangladesh—A Brutal Birth (1972) is one of the seminal works in Indian photobook history. Kishor Parekh was a photographer, a documentarian, an artist and a fashion icon, all rolled into one inimitable persona.

In 1982, Kishor Parekh died at the Valley of Flowers, where he was working on what would have been his third book. He was only 52. A few days before his death, while soaking in the beauty of the valley, Parekh told his best friend with typical candour “…what a place to die yaar!” A man who had chronicled the edges of life and death almost preempted his own. As a massive heart attack battled him, he calmly kept his beloved Nikon F2 on the ground and laid with it one last time.