The passion and compassion evident in Gauri Gill’s photographic work make Anita Dube reflect on the fragility and strength of human bonds.
“…I WANTED TO EXPLORE IT NOT AS A QUESTION (A THEME) BUT AS A WOUND: I SEE, I FEEL, HENCE I NOTICE, I observe, and I think”1
Hurran crouches on the diagonal edge of jagged rocks, impersonating a beast! She can devour us with her tender craziness, like many of the protagonists in Gauri Gill’s Notes from the Desert, on view from March 27th to April 24th at Nature Morte, New Delhi. Printed at 50% grey, these notes – as if bleached by the blinding light of the desert and offset by its harsh terrain – function critically at the edges of an ‘Incredible India’!
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Two girls pose in front of a crumbling wall with their outstretched hands clasped together, each carefully balancing a precious egg that echoes the small oval shelves cut into the sandy backdrop behind them. Those shelves appear as the eyes in an abstract face of tenuous life in the impoverished rural Rajasthani desert where these nomadic peoples live. Karima and Nimli, in a Home Destroyed by Flooding, like the other photographs in Indian photographic artist Gauri Gill’s expansive ten-year study in Rajasthan, is displayed without a numeric date in her solo exhibition — "Notes from the Desert" — at the New Delhi gallery Nature Morte.
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For the first time in many years, I had the opportunity to see a show on women in Rajasthan that did not bore me to death instantly. Really, I don't remember the last time that I saw works on this subject that did not feature some version of a romanticized desert land, complete with cheerfully poor folks, or worse, obscenely rich princelings. Gauri Gill's works,
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In 1999, photographer Gauri Gill traveled to Rajasthan to take pictures of village schools, many of which had just been opened as part of both government and NGO led initiatives. What she saw there impressed her so forcefully that her intended one month photo-journalism excursion turned into an 11 year project...
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Notes From The Desert
TEN YEARS. THOUSANDS OF ENCOUNTERS. PHOTOGRAPHER GAURI GILL HAS FOUND A RAJASTHAN FAR FROM THE COFFEE-TABLE BOOK CLICHÉS, SAYS NISHA SUSAN
How did this work come about? And how have the communities changed?
In April 1999 I began photographing village schools in Rajasthan. Earlier that year I had seen a girl being beaten by her teacher in a small school in Narlai. I wanted to understand what it was like being a girl in a village school so I took a monthlong sabbatical and travelled through rural Rajasthan. I started by travelling from school to random school, from Jaipur to Jodhpur, Osiyan, Bikaner, Barmer, Churu; government and NGO schools, Balika Shivirs to Marushalas to Rajiv Gandhi Pathshalas.
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Ideas that get rejected in newsrooms have a way of taking on a life of their own. Perhaps newsrooms, for all the insensitivity we accuse them of, are unusually prescient. Eleven years ago, restless after seeing a little girl being beaten by her teacher, photographer Gauri Gill came back to Delhi with an idea for a photo essay: what is it like to be a girl in a village school? But the newsmagazine she worked for couldn't find a 'peg' to carry it. Story dropped, Gill took off on a month-long sabbatical to Rajasthan.
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