NEW DELHI (INDIA) (ITALPRESS) – India is a country that is not allowed to focus with one goal. Too big, too contradictory, too projected towards the future to be inside a photograph. Yet the Pirelli calendar, at its 53rd edition, decided to try. For the first time, The Cal arrives in the subcontinent, between the brilliant alleys of Delhi, the colors of Rajasthan and the modernity of Mumbai. A journey into beauty, but also in a country that runs fast. A country in which Pirelli decided to bet with the industry, signing on the eve of the presentation a maxi deal with the Indian group BKT to produce up to 800 thousand premium tyres per year by 2030.
In the same hours when Ferrari presented “Luce” to the local market. Two faces of the same coin: that of an India that seduces the goal and that which conquers an increasingly important place in the strategies of Italian companies. On the one hand, women, colours, traditions and roads that seem to never sleep; on the other, establishments, technology and the market. Because beauty can be a work of art, but the future, for those who do business, also needs factories. The 2027 calendar, presented in New Delhi, was born from the encounter of three looks and two generations.
For the first time there are three photographers involved: the Norwegian Sølve Sundsbø, already author of the 2026 edition, and Raghu Rai, master of Indian photography who died last April. The daughter Avani, picked up the witness by turning an unfinished project into a personal story. Not a simple succession of images, but a dialogue between memory and contemporaneity, between India photographed for over sixty years by a great reporter and what today changes under the eyes of its inhabitants.
The result is a calendar that is not content to pose beauty. Avani reports the archive photographs of his father in the places where they were born, between the flower market of Old Delhi, the crowded alleys, a school and the streets of Mumbai. Around those images India is moving today: boys on skates, musicians, families, men and women who cross everyday life.
A pop kaleidoscope, coloured, sometimes surreal, where the past is not a dusty frame but an interlocutor with whom to count. “An inheritance can never be blind,” explains Avani, who chose not to repeat the paternal language. And adds a reflection that goes well beyond photography: “When life happens right outside your door, you have the responsibility to document it.”.
Again, in the face of questions about images and freedom of expression, he prefers to let his work speak: “Art is always political.” The other goal is that of Sundsbø, who chose to focus on nine extraordinary female personalities, portrayed between Fort Jaigarh and Ajabgarh, in Rajasthan. There are actresses Freida Pinto, Aditi Rao Hydari and Avantika Vandanapu, musician Anoushka Shankar, poet Rupi Kaur, models Lakshmi Menon and Bhavitha Mandava, entrepreneur and conductor Padma Lakshmi, as well as the same Avani Rai.
Different women for history, talent and sensitivity, united by the desire to escape labels. Sundsbø, who knows how easy it is to trade a country for a postcard. “I didn’t feel like trying to represent India in all its complexity, I didn’t have the right to do so,” he explains. He left the Rai the task of telling the deepest essence, choosing to play with colors, textures of clothes and contrasts, but above all to seek the authenticity of the protagonists.” A country that changes, therefore, and that does not want to be told only through its contradictions.
Sundsbø, for his part, tells of having lived the return to the Pirelli calendar “as in the Russian mountains”, divided between enthusiasm and fear of falling into the clichés of a European look. His photography, too, assures, has become: less built and technological than the beginnings, more natural and authentic. A choice that is also worth taking away from the idea that artificial intelligence can do everything. “Ia is a tool for me, a tool, but I don’t let myself condition,” he explains.
Moreover, the Pirelli calendar has always tried to be something more than a collection of seductive images. “Year after year has become a very long-awaited art object, it must not sell anything, promote nothing, it is there to express an artistic vision,” says Marco Tronchetti Provera, executive president of Pirelli. And yet, in this edition, the geographical and industrial coincidence is difficult to ignore. While The Cal celebrates the beauty and complexity of India, the group strengthens its presence in the Asian market with the agreement signed with BKT, which aims to produce 800 thousand premium tyres by 2030. “India moves looking to the future, has an extraordinary growth, which has its rules, complex, full of nuances,” says Tronchetti Provera.
A difficult country to decipher, but for this very rich of opportunities. “It allows us to look at a future that is still to be explored, where there are tensions, but there is a great desire for the future, a big push towards the future.” And then the 2027 calendar also becomes this: the portrait of a nation that does not want to remain captive of its history and that offers itself to the world with all its nuances, without sacrificing traditions or ambition to change. Pirelli tells her with photography and accompanies her with an industrial agreement.
In the end, India is a country that brings together the ancient and futuristic, the alley and the skyscraper, the flower market and technology. To tell you it takes three photographers; to conquer the market, obviously, it also serves an industrial partner. And if the Pirelli calendar succeeds in transforming all this into beauty, BKT will have to take care of the most concrete part: make sure that the future, in addition to being charming, also has the right tires to go far.
-Photo press office Calendar Pirelli-
(ITALPRESS).
