Every photo Raman Rao gives us is another chance to free ourselves from the familiar, defying our perception to devise a way to come to grips with something unknown, since any semblance of a secure point of view has been jeopardized by a compass that has become miraculously obsolete. In his best photos we fail (willingly) to connect: floating free as it were, formless, nameless, seeing ourselves as he sees us, looking back as we search to find what we desire to see in every image. Photography is the relative recognition of a collective hallucination of appetite. It is also an instant lie, since nothing isn’t in perpetual motion. But who cares? Now, thanks to Rao’s vision, we can see what we want to see that wasn’t there before he let us see it.
(from “What You See Is Who We Are: On the Photography of Raman Rao” - C. Brooke Rothwell, 2014)