Project MUSE - American Quarterly - Viewing South Asia, Seeing America: Gauri Gill's "The Americans" Project MUSE Journals American Quarterly Volume 62, Number 1, March 2010 Viewing South Asia, Seeing America: Gauri Gill's "The Americans" American Quarterly Volume 62, Number 1, March 2010 E-ISSN: 1080-6490 Print ISSN: 0003-0678 Viewing South Asia, Seeing AmericaGauri Gill's "The Americans" Bakirathi Mani Gauri Gill: The Americans. Organized by Bose Pacia / Nature Morte Galleries. Bose Pacia, Kolkata, February 16–March 8, 2008; Nature Morte, New Delhi, March 15–29, 2008;
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Look—and you will find yourself. When you look at Gauri Gill's images in her touring collection The Americans, it sometimes feels as if you're gazing into a mirror and seeing a reflection of yourself. Indeed, there will be few immigrants who do not see a piece of themselves, a bit of their story echoed in her photographs.
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A Gray haired man sits on a chair facing a glass table with half eaten plates of Indian food, bottled water and a golden yellow drink, while a black and white bollywood flim flickers on the television and a neon blue bed light clock above it informs you of the time..
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"Recent Indian photographers have used their medium to reveal, interpret, and influence the multifaceted nature of Indian identity and cross-cultural experiences in India and abroad. This paper explores a selection of these photographers' strategies, which range form relatively straightforward photo essays on Indian experience overseas by Pablo Bartholomew, Omar Badsha and Gauri Gill, to Ketaki Sheth's meditations on the creation and nation, to explorations of deeply private realms of interpersonal relationship"….
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"Gauri Gill's collection of photographs on the Indian diaspora are a kaleidoscope of the known entity, the well-recorded struggles and the achievements. Fighting for space inside the confines of the Bose Pacia gallery in Manhattan, the five dozen photographs showcase the struggles to succeed as well as fit socially in a country that is as different from India as chalk in from cheese"…
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"Bright, colorful, and enlarged photographs grace the walls of the Chicago Cultural Center's Michigan Avenue Galleries, drawing the "oos" "aahs" and eyes of even the museum's predominantly WASPY clientele.
These photographs comprise Gauri Gill's exhibition, The Americans, which takes inspiration from photographer Robert Frank's photo essay of the same name that depicts mid-20th century American culture. Gill's project, however, focuses on the range of Indian-American experience before and after the terrorist attacks of 9/11—a time during which turban-clad Sikh Indians are deemed as Muslim or "other" and made the target of hate crimes by their fellow Americans. Traveling the U.S. between"…
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" As we have all come to know, the South Asian diaspora in America is a wild and dynamic mix of tenacious traditionalism and postmodern sophistication that defies comparison with any other immigrant group. Gauri Gill, who offers up lucid color photographs of Indian Americans from across the country in varied settings and activities, is exquisitely successful in capturing the complexity and underscoring a singular vitality"…
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Gauri Gill's "The Americans" on display in the Michigan Avenue Galleries is a remarkable body of work. To fully grasp what it is that Gill attempts in this project we need to understand something about an earlier project – the Jewish, Swiss-American photographer Robert Frank's work of the same name published in 1958. It is to this earlier work that Gill explicitly refers, and it is within this broader history of photography that her work needs to be placed.
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"What I love about photography is its blend of the documentary and the artful; how a good photograph can have the surprising, sudden candour of a short story; a minor key insight that suggests the whole symphony of a life; how it seems to steal a scene from your own fleeting memory, forcing you to see the everyday in all its sharply faceted meaning..."
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"There is a quite audaciousness in the title of Gauri Gill's first solo exhibition of photographs –The Americans (Bose Pacia, until March 8). In 1955, exactly a quarter of a century before Gill was born in Chandigarh, Robert Frank – a Swiss Jew in his early thirties, who had photographs of its people and spaces. Frank covered almost all 48 states in an old, used car and then selected eighty-odd photographs from the several thousands he had taken to create a book called The American"…
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"Chinese contemporary art, glinting and posturing, continues to hold the limelight, but for my money the work being made in India these days is the real deal, deep and rich. This is party because it is less intent on promoting itself to an international market. It is inwardly probing rather than outwardly ingratiating"…
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