Gauri Gill: Online Viewing Room

I’m interested in the human strategies through which people survive the precariousness: expressions of humor, resistance, and uncanny beauty.  —Gauri Gill

For nearly two decades, Gauri Gill has investigated the interplay between obscurity and power through her images of daily life in rural India. Gill has established herself as a force in the photography field, shaping a new image of life in India. Her photographs unearth acts of resilience by honoring her subjects in vernacular moments and moving the spotlight away from the media’s one-dimensional portrayal of oppression, the struggle for education, healthcare and land issues faced by India’s rural and indigenous communities. According to Gill, “the universal is often achieved by looking at the local or the quotidian, things that are familiar and therefore not exotic, but never ordinary.”

“In a sense, my own endeavour has involved learning to listen more deeply, and to see more clearly, and collectively. While photography is a democratic medium in some respects, as almost everyone today has access to some form of camera, there is disproportionate power in terms of who gets to tell the story. My own small attempt has been to try and cede control of representation, and individualisation. When I focus only on the explicit object—which itself is constantly changing—I fail to pay heed to all of the process and players embedded in it. Even in attempting to deconstruct the process I end up creating new centres of focus. In truth, there is a multitude behind any single act—or any solidified convergence of acts, that appear in the form of an object. And there is an ever flowing continuum, which follows naturally from what came before.” - Gauri Gill on Acts of Appearance

“This large archive of more than 40,000 negatives now encompasses various narratives and stories within it, as well as different forms of image making, from posed studio pictures to cinema verite style images. I hope to eventually make a series of books—each one a note from the desert.” - Gauri Gill 

“As much as the work engages with conditions that are unjust in the world, I have wished to privilege all the ingenious ways people find to swim, to stay afloat, despite fragile or precarious circumstances. These small acts of resistance and beauty by individuals or communities are all we have in the end, and wherein lies hope.” - Gauri Gill

“In 2005 I met a great Dai or midwife, Kasumbi Dai, at a birthing workshop organised by NGO friends. She invited me to photograph her work, to be there when she delivered her grandchild in the remote village of Motasar, in Ghafan. I lived with her for ten days before the baby came, and I ended up assisting with the birth. A great feminist, someone who became a mid wife after she lost her own husband at a young age, Kasumbi Dai had delivered all the children in the surrounding areas for miles. I see her as the Mother of Mothers. The set of pictures became the Birth Series.” - Gauri Gill