Gauri Gill (born 1970) is an Indian contemporary photographer who lives in New Delhi.
In October 2022, Gill's first mid-career survey exhibition was held at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, and subsequently travelled to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, in January 2023. In 2018, she became the first Indian photographer to present a solo exhibition at MoMA PS1, New York. She also participated in Documenta 14, held in Athens and Kassel in 2017.
Gill received the Prix Pictet award for Photography and Sustainability in 2023 for her series Notes from the Desert. In the same year, she was nominated for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2024. In 2011, she was awarded the Grange Prize for contemporary photography. The jury said her works "often address ordinary heroism within challenging environments depicting the artist's often-intimate relationships with her subjects with a documentary spirit and a human concern over issues of survival."
Gill has published two books documenting her collaborations with rural artists in India, Acts of Appearance and Fields of Sight, both published by Edition Patrick Frey, Zurich.
Education and early life Born in Chandigarh, India, Gauri Gill received her BFA in Applied Art at the Delhi College of Arts in New Delhi, India. She earned her BFA in Photography at the Parsons School of Design, New York in 1994, and MFA in Photography at Stanford University in 2002.
Work and career
The Americans
Gill began the series The Americans (2000–2007) after noticing the limited visibility of South Asian communities in educational and museum contexts. The project documents South Asian individuals and families across the United States, exploring questions of identity and belonging, particularly in the period surrounding the events of 11 September 2001. The title intentionally references Robert Frank's The Americans (1958), which Gill has stated was intended to situate South Asian experience within the photographic canon.
Art critic Gayatri Sinha has written that the series examines the cultural and emotional dimensions of diaspora and migration. Anthropologist and art historian Christopher Pinney has described the project as offering multiple possible interpretations, noting its attention to everyday life, cultural continuity, and internal tensions within diasporic communities.
The Americans was Gill's first solo exhibition, and was shown at various locations within India and across the world from 2008–2009, including Bose Pacia Kolkata (16 February – 8 March 2008), Nature Morte, New Delhi (15–29 March 2008); Matthieu Foss Gallery, Mumbai (10 – 24 April 2008); Thomas Welton Art Gallery, Stanford University (8 July – 17 August 2008); Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago (4 October – 28 December); and Bose Pacia Gallery, New York (9 January – 14 February 2009).
Notes from the Desert
Notes from the Desert (1999–ongoing), is a long-term body of work documenting communities in rural Rajasthan. Begun in 1999, the open archive has resulted in individual exhibitions and projects drawn from it such as The Mark on the Wall, Traces, Birth Series, Jannat, Balika Mela and Ruined Rainbow.
The photographs from the series Notes from the Desert, are taken as Gill travels through Jaipur, Jodhpur, Osiyan, Bikaner, Barmer, Phalodi, Baran, Churu districts, photographing mainly in the villages of Western Rajasthan, but also across the State. The friends and acquaintances she made during her early visits, and to whom she returns again and again, become the subjects of her photographs. The series captures intimate realities and strategies for survival in precarious circumstances, all set in the difficult terrain of the desert. In Gill's own words: "I'm interested in how people find ways to swim and stay afloat; it's not about the drowning."
Through processes of subsequent editing of this large archive of over 40,000 negatives, Gill derives her sub-series.
In The Mark on the Wall (1999–ongoing), titled after Virginia Woolf's short story of the same name, Gill photographs drawings on school walls made by local artists, teachers and school children to help teach children visually from the classroom walls. With images showing numbers, seasons, anatomy, the English and Hindi alphabets and other pedagogical materials for young learners, these drawings were produced under the state's now lapsed Leher Kaksha government scheme, as well as subsequent similar government schemes. In the artist's own words, "From the most tentative marks to those ever more sophisticated, from determined depictions of children making their way to school to individualistic expressions of nature, from maps of the village to symbols of the State, in what these fragments choose to express—to represent, aspire to, or impart as learning—are offered revealing glimpses of the collective mind of a rural community."
Traces (1999–ongoing), memorialises marked and unmarked graves in the desert. Made using natural and found materials, these often discreet graves are very personal and often unrecognisable to outsiders. The graves are marked with stones, shards of pottery, hand-inscribed gravestones or personal items, which help cultivate memory and mark remembrance. Over time these ephemeral markers become one with the earth on which they were laid. The graves belong to both nomads and settled people, Hindus and Muslims, allied in their scarce access to resources.
The Birth Series (2005), consists of a set of circular photographs of the great midwife Kasumbi Dai who lived in the remote village of Motasar, Ghafan, taken as she delivers her granddaughter, a delivery which Gill ended up both photographing and assisting with. "For all its 'naturalness' and simplicity, as an event the birth has a solemn, almost meditative component, as expressed in the midwife's vividly lined, life-filled face." note the curators of the Tinguely exhibition.
In 2018, Gill's work was exhibited alongside Mengele-Totentanz (1986), an installation by Swiss artist Jean Tinguely created in response to a devastating fire near his studio. The exhibition explored the conceptual parallels between Tinguely's "ludic macabrism"—his tendency to counter themes of mortality with vital, kinetic energy—and Gill's documentation of life cycles in the desert of West Rajasthan.
In dialogue with Tinguely's exploration of faith and death, Gill selected two of her series, Traces and Birth Series, which examine memory, mortality, and the persistence of life within precarious environments. "Tinguely grappled with the concept of memento mori all his life, seeking invariably to answer death with life, and Gauri's photographs initiate a dialogue with his work, addressing his preoccupation with the subject of coming into being and passing away, with existential angst and extinction," said Roland Wetzel, director of Tinguely Museum, about the exhibition.
Jannat, made between 1999–2007 follows the life of Izmat, whom Gill met at the very beginning of her travels through Rajasthan, and who remains a close friend to this day, along with her two daughters. As Alexander Keefe notes, "Jannat affords an intimate glimpse into the life of a desperately impoverished and imperiled family on the very edge of India."
The series consisting of a circular narrative of 44 black and white images and 8 letters – a total of 52 pieces, "one for each week in the year, essentially" and it "... is really not so much a documentary of a particular individual or family's life, but more her experience of the kind of love that was felt in this family relationship. She (the artist) says it's a story of love, fundamentally," as quoted by curator Carol Huh who curated this series and other works from Notes from the Desert for an exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution in 2016, which was Gill's first major solo presentation in a Museum.
In 2003, Gill was invited by the non-profit organisation, Urmul Setu Sansthan, "to do something with photography" at the Balika Mela—a fair for girls—organised by them. In response, Gill set up a simple makeshift photo studio on site, for anyone to come and have their portrait taken and later buy the black-and-white silver gelatin print if they liked. Many girls came, some with their friends, some with their teachers, an odd few with their brothers, and many bringing along their own props to pose with. Of this work, she says, "The girls who come to the fair have an urge to know. Those who stepped into my photo tend also wished to portray themselves, as they are, or as they see themselves, or to invent new selves for the camera. Their attempts may have been tentative or bold, but this book may be seen as a catalogue of that desire."
In 2010, Gill attended the Balika Mela again, and exhibited the images taken in 2003. She also took more portraits, but this time in colour.
Ruined Rainbow (1999–2010) consists of photographs derived from rolls of film made by children in villages in Barmer district while participating in photography activities organised during Gill's visits. Some of the film rolls were accidentally exposed to light and subsequently discarded as unusable. In 2010, Gill revisited these negatives while editing material for the exhibition Notes from the Desert and incorporated the images into the project. The resulting photographs, marked by light leaks and colour distortions caused by accidental exposure, form the basis of the series, which reflects on chance, authorship, and the role of accident in photographic processes.
Jannat was exhibited at Asia Centre, London; Houston Photo Festival; Balika Mela at Goa Photo Festival; Birth Series at Birla Academy Kolkata, The Mark on the Wall in Documenta, Epigraphic Museum, Athens and Ruined Rainbow at the Art Institute of Chicago; among other places. In 2011 she won the Grange Prize, Canada's most prestigious contemporary photography award. This award, founded by the Art Gallery of Ontario and Aeroplan in 2007, nominates two Canadian and two international photographers from a selected country (from India in 2011). The four nominated photographers are invited for a residency at the AGO and the final winner is selected by public voting after an online and offline exhibition of works held on the AGO premises by all the nominated photographers. Gill was announced as the recipient of the Prix Pictet award for Photography and Sustainability for the series ‘Notes from the Desert' on 28 September 2023 at a ceremony held at the V&A Museum in London.
Rememory
In 2003, Gill also began documenting the semi-rural urban settlements and mofussil towns of Rajasthan, and which later grew to include suburbs and satellite towns from Mumbai, Delhi, and other large and cosmopolitan metropolises; and which eventually came together under the series Rememory, the title borrowed from Toni Morrison. The black-and-white photographs focus on "negative spaces," peripheries, and the aesthetic "encroachments" between rural and urban environments. Often devoid of human figures, the photographs still reflect their complex psychology as they seamlessly adopt elements from sterile global designs, merging them with traditional and home grown environments, to create hybrid and inventive architectures, ones that reflect the globalised aspirations and constantly changing dreams of their inhabitants. The series further examines the resulting social dislocations, including the displacement of migrant workers and the fundamental reshaping of the natural landscape to meet human desire.