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Gauri Gill (b. 1970) is an Indian contemporary photographer. She lives and works in New Delhi. She has been called "one of India's most respected photographers" by the New York Times and one of “the most thoughtful photographers active in India today” in The Wire.

Her photographs have been exhibited within India and across the world, including the the Kochi Biennale; Freer and Sackler Galleries of Art at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Wiener Library, London; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Herbert F. Johnson Museum at Cornell University and National Gallery of Art, Warsaw. Her work is in the collections of prominent North American and Indian institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Freer and Sackler Galleries of Art at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC; Deutsche Bank, Frankfurt and Fotomuseum, Winterthur, and in 2011 she was awarded the Grange Prize, Canada’s foremost award for photography.

In 2011 Gill was awarded the Grange Prize, Canada's most prestigious contemporary photography award. 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,”

Early Life and Experiences

Gill was born in Chandigarh, India in 1970, and currently lives in New Delhi. She studied in northern India as a child and later earned a BFA (Applied Art) from the Delhi College of Art, New Delhi, a BFA (Photography) from Parsons School of Design, New York and an MFA (Art) from Stanford University, California. On her return to India from New York in 1994, she worked as a photojournalist and freelance photographer for various Indian publications including Outlook magazine. After completing her MFA in 2002 she has taught photography at institutions such as NID in Ahmedabad and Ambedkar Universty in Delhi, conducted workshops with rural girls through Urmul Setu in Lunkaransar, Tibetan refugee students in New Delhi, or local photographers in Kabul through the Goethe Institute; as well as curated traveling exhibitions for the activist groups Jagori, Youthreach and Sangath. In January 2007, along with Sunil Gupta and Radhika Singh, she co-founded and edited 'Camerawork Delhi' a free newsletter about independent photography from New Delhi and elsewhere. Since 1994 she has continued to work on her own personal projects, which often take many years. Her first solo was held in 2008. “It was her first show. She was 38 at the time. Till then, the photos had been sitting in boxes. “I mistrust quick work,” she says. “I like to let the photos sit. You may think one day that you have done this genius thing. But when you see the photo over a period of time, sometimes that feeling passes and only sometimes it holds.”

Ideas and Works

Gill’s practice is complex because it contains several lines of pursuit. These include a more than decade-long study of marginalized communities in rural Rajasthan called Notes from the Desert (1999 –ongoing) which comprises individual works such as The Mark on the Wall, Jannat, Balika Mela, Birth Series and Ruined Rainbow. “Nomads and migrants, minorities and peasants, all struggling to sustain themselves and their families, the people pictured are not only territorially marginalized but lead precarious lives, their existences largely spectral, invisible to the majority of Indian society.” “To set up a photographic project in rural Rajasthan, in black and white, stretching over a decade, goes against the grain of several stereotypes; and signals the maturing of a ‘voice’ within the corpus of Photography in India. Defrocked of its color and tourism potential, Rajasthan, is scoured at the nomadic margins; revealing lives in transition: epic cycles of birth, death, drought, flood, celebration and devastation, through which they pass. The extremity of the situation requires no illustration or pictorialism- those vexed twins of the colonial legacy- especially from an insider, or the one who is led by the hand. Her subjects take her into their world, and she goes there like Alice.”

Her first book from the series contains portraits of rural adolescent girls. Balika Mela (2003/2010) was published by Edition Patrick Frey in 2012. “Finally, Gill’s “Balika Mela” is not just centered around the leisure space that the fair offered for these girls but also the difficult circumstances of their lives which form the subversive backdrop to almost every portrait. It is also a testimony to the power of the camera and the conflict of perspective between the person standing behind the lens and the one at whom it is pointed; the dissonance between what we as viewers read and what the poseur wished to communicate about themselves through their composure. If a portrait is expected to encapsulate some fragment of truth, in Gill’s portraits, it remains elusive. Gill articulates this perfectly towards the end of her essay. “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.”

“Much of her (Gill’s) work focuses on displaced communities and the ways in which they attempt to hold on to identities that are under threat of being erased by structures and forces beyond their control.”

In The Americans (2000-2007) she photographed her family and friends across the Indian diaspora in America. "Given Gill’s explicit invocation of Frank (apparent, as I’ve suggested at so many different levels), how should we understand the object of her critique? Does she intend to present Indo-Americans as part of a liberating counter-culture? Is she mounting a critique in part of a US consumerist dream that fails to deliver for most Indian-Americans? This seems implicit in a number of powerful images which take the viewer very close to the quotidian routines of low-paid manual work (for instance the moving diptych showing Laljibhai and Pushpa Patel cleaning the Days Inn West in Mississippi). But is she also mounting a critique from within of aspects of the Indic tradition, of targets such as religious orthodoxy, Bollywood and patriarchy? The display of cut-out victims from a benefit function for the subjects of domestic violence suggests this quite clearly. The serried ranks of Bollywood videos with peeling labels set alongside racks of salwarkameez may be intended to communicate the routinized repetitive actions of diaspora nostalgia. Or it may be intended to record its tenacity – its steadfastness, and endurance, in this new context. Such ambivalence, of course – and the power it gives the viewer to come to their own conclusions - is a considerable part of the power that Gauri Gill’s project offers. Like Robert Frank’s work, her images are not easily "selected and interpreted", but they speak of things that are there: "anywhere and everywhere"."

In another series about the immigrant experience and human displacement, What Remains (2007 - 2011), Gill used photographs and texts to document the displacement of the Indo-Afghan community from Kabul to Delhi, over successive waves of migration, to question notions of identity, home and belonging.

Projects such as the 1984 notebooks (2005- 2014) highlight her sustained belief in collaboration and ‘active listening’, and in using photography as a memory practice. This notebook about the anti-Sikh pogrom that occurred in New Delhi in 1984 contains photographs taken by Gill in 2005, 2009 and 2014 alongside captions from the Indian print media in which they first appeared and text responses by thirty-five artists - including writers, poets and filmmakers. The photographs from 2005 appeared in Tehelka (with Hartosh Bal); and from 2009 in Outlook (with Shreevatsa Nevatia). The corresponding captions are roughly as they were inscribed in the published reports. The notebook is disseminated via the internet for free – anyone can print out a copy, to keep or distribute.

Since 2013, she has collaborated with Rajesh Vangad, a renowned Warli artist, on Fields of Sight, combining the contemporary language of photography with the ancient one of Warli drawing to co-create new narratives. “We see here a photographer of and from contemporary, urban India (though of a land-centered community herself), and an artist/painter of the Adivasi community from Maharashtra, whose visual narratives work together to tell stories that demand to be heard as equally contemporary, and not as relics of a traditional, or “tribal” past, a term that the British as well as independent India have called Vangad’s communities. He is not a ‘lost” figure of what Renato Rosaldo called “imperial nostalgia,” asking us to mourn what we ourselves have destroyed. He is not destroyed, but there, producing a language and art practice that uses the modern medium – the photograph, the motorcycle – to assert presence rather than provide the possibility of mechanical replication of that which is lost. Gill’s own photographic practice of collaboration and presence (see her work 1984, for instance) uses the photograph as a memory practice that asserts that the moment of photographic capture can prevent closure of stories of violence and suffering. Her characters challenge us to remember that their stories are not over, much remains to be done, whether it is redress, reparation, or in this case, recognition that identities of those deemed to be un-modern remain to challenge the politics of the neo-liberal state that denies that minority communities have a stake in the country’s future.”

Three bodies of work — Fields of Sight; Places, Traces and The Mark on the Wall —make up Gill's most recent exhibition, also titled, The Mark on the Wall. In The Mark on the Wall — the title is borrowed from a Virginia Woolf short story, where the writer talks about getting obsessed with one little mark on the wall — the photographer returns to another ongoing series. Gill has been documenting drawings created by local artists, children and teachers in government schools in western Rajasthan since 2002. "To my mind, all three series are connected. Ranjit (Hoskote, cultural theorist) in his essay uses collaboration as one way to relate them," she points out. "It is certainly intrinsic to my process — as with Balika Mela which were collaborative portraits, or then the 1984 notebooks where artists responded via written texts to my photographs to suggest alternative ways of addressing the unspeakable." At its heart, the show, she says, "is about 'mark making' whether by people onto the landscape, or a great artist like Rajeshji onto my photographs (or mediated landscapes), or of artists, children and teachers in village schools, who make marks of assertion in which there is not only fragility, but also agency. I find, therefore, grounds for optimism."

Solo Shows

2016

‘Notes from the Desert: Photographs by Gauri Gill’, Sackler Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC ‘The Mark on the Wall’, Galerie Mirchandani and Steinruecke, Mumbai

2014

'Balika Mela' and 'Jannat', Thomas Erben Gallery, New York

2012

‘Balika Mela’, Nature Morte Gallery, New Delhi; Book Launch at Fotomuseum, Winterthur

2011

‘What Remains’, Green Cardamom Gallery, London

2010

‘Notes from the Desert’, Nature Morte Gallery, New Delhi; Matthieu Foss Gallery, Mumbai; Focus Gallery, Chennai; Urmul Setu Sansthan, Lunkaransar

2008 - 11

‘The Americans’, Bose Pacia Gallery, Kolkata; Chatterjee and Lal Gallery, Mumbai; Nature Morte Gallery, New Delhi; Thomas Welton Art Gallery, Stanford University; Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago; Bose Pacia Gallery, New York; Missisauga Central Library, Missisauga

Selected Two Person/Group Exhibitions

2016-17

‘Kochi-Muziris Biennale’, Kochi, Kerala

2016

'Dislocation/Negotiating Identity: Contemporary Photographs from South and Southeast Asia', Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton

'Unsuspending Disbelief', Curated by Laura Letinsky, Logan Gallery, University of Chicago, Chicago

'Tabiyat: Medicine and Healing in India' Curated by Ratan Vaswani, Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya, Mumbai and 'Jeevanchakra', Curated by Latika Gupta, Akar Prakar, Kolkata

2015

'Picture This: Contemporary Photography and India', Curated by Nathaniel Stein, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia

'Ruins and Fabrications', Curated by Bakirathi Mani, Twelve Gates Arts, Philadelphia

‘POST DATE: Photography and Inherited History in India', Curated by Jodi Throckmorton, San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose; Ulrich Museum of Art, Kansas

'Nameless here for evermore', Khoj International Artists Association, New Delhi

'My Memory, Your History: Narratives on the North', Curated by Priya Pall, Birla Academy of Art and Culture, Kolkata

2014

'The Missing Pavilion', Curated by Gayatri Sinha and JNU students, School of Arts and Aesthetics, JNU, New Delhi

‘Ways of Seeing: Gauri Gill and Seher Shah’, Experimenter Gallery, Kolkata ‘1984’, The Wiener Library, London

‘Rectangular Squares’, Curated by Esa Epstein, Sepia Eye Gallery, New York

‘Punctum Reflections on Photography’, Curated by Seamus Healey, Salzburger Kunstverein, Salzburg

‘Invisible Cities’, Curated by Bhooma Padmanabhan, Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi

'Ganjad Portraits', Regal Cinema Building, Connaught Place, New Delhi; Ganjad Primary School, Ganjad

'Forms of Activism: 25 years of Sahmat', Lalit Kala Academy, New Delhi

‘Insert 2014’, Curated by Raqs Media Collective, Indira Gandhi National Center for the Arts, New Delhi

2013

'Aethetic Bind Citizen Artist: forms of address', Curated by Geeta Kapur, Chemould Gallery, Mumbai '

Delhi Photo Festival', Habitat Center, New Delhi

'Lines of Control: Partition as a productive space', Curated by Iftikhar Dadi and Hammad Nasar, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University

'Duende', Curated by Gitanjali Dang, Rote Fabrik, Zurich

'A Photograph is Not an Opinion – Contemporary Photography by Women', Curated by Sunil Gupta and Veerangana Solanki, Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai

2012

‘The Needle on the Gauge’, Curated by Ranjit Hoskote, The Contemporary Art Institute of Southern Australia, Adelaide

'There Was A Country Where They Were All Thieves', Curated by Natasha Ginwala, Jeanine Hofland Contemporary Art, Amsterdam

'The Portrait: Contemporary Indian Photography', Curated by Devika Daulet-Singh, Fremantle Arts Centre, Fremantle

‘Lines of Control: Partition as a Productive Space’, Curated by Hammad Nasar, Iftikhar Dadi and Ellen Avril, Herbert F. Johnson Museum at Cornell University; Nasher Museum, Duke University

‘Cynical Love: Life in the Everyday’, Curated by Gayatri Sinha, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi

2011

‘The Grange Prize Exhibition’ Curated by Michelle Jacques, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto

'Step Across This Line', Contemporary artists from Bangladesh, India and Pakistan, Curated by Deeksha Nath, Asia House, London

'The Matter Within: New Contemporary Art of India', Curated by Betti-Sue Hertz, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco

'Generation in Transition', Curated by Magda Kardasz, Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw; Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius

'Staging Selves: Power, Performativity and Portraiture', Curated by Maya Kovskaya, Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai

‘Homespun’, Curated by Girish Shahane, Devi Art Foundation, New Delhi

'Picturing Parallax: Photography and Video from the South Asian Diaspora', Curated by Santhi Kavuri-Bauer, SF State Fine Arts Gallery, San Francisco

'The Americans', Curated by Haema Sivanesan, Mississauga Central Library, Mississauga. Featured exhibition in Contact Photo Festival (solo)

‘Something I’ve been meaning to tell you’, Curated by Sunil Gupta and Vidya Shivadas, Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi

‘Hall of Technology’, Artist Project, Indian Art Summit, New Delhi

2010

‘Light Drifts’, Curated by Eve Lemesle, Matthieu Foss Gallery, Mumbai

‘US TODAY: AFTER KATRINA’, Curated by Phillipe Durand and Joerg Bader, Institut d'art Contemporain, Villeurbanne, Lyon

‘Docutour’, Curated by Bose Krishnamachari, BMB Gallery, Mumbai

‘Where Three Dreams Cross’ – 150 years of photography from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, Whitechapel Gallery, London; Fotomuseum, Winterthur, Switzerland. Curated by Sunil Gupta.

‘Punctum 1 – A critical look at the landscape in South Asian Photography’, Curated by Arshiya Lonkhandwala, Lakeeren, Mumbai

2009

‘Outside In: Indian Art Abroad’, Curated by Courtney Gilbert, Sun Valley Center for the Arts, Idaho

‘Rememory’, Two-person show with Tomoko Yoneda, Lucy Mackintosh Gallery, Lausanne

‘The Astonishment of Being’, Curated by Deeksha Nath, Birla Academy of Art and Culture, Kolkata

‘The Self and The Other - Portraiture in Contemporary Indian Photography’, Curated by Luisa Ortinez and Devika Daulet Singh, La Virreina Centre de la Imatge of the Institut de Cultura (City Council of Barcelona), Palau de La Virreina. Exhibition travels to Atrium in Vitoria

‘Shifting Shapes –Unstable Signs’, Curated by Robert Storr and Jaret Vadehra, Yale Art Gallery, Yale University, New Haven

2008

‘The Nature of the City’, Curated by Alexander Keefe and Nitin Mukul, Religare Art Gallery, New Delhi

‘Zeitgeist’, Curated by Latika Gupta, Palette Art Gallery, New Delhi

'Click! Indian Photography Now', Curated by Sunil Gupta and Radhika Singh, Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi and London

2007

'City Cite Site', Curated by Latika Gupta, Anant Art Gallery, New Delhi

'Photoquai', Curated by Helene Cerruti, Musee Quai Branly, Paris

'Public Places, Private Spaces' - Contemporary Photography and Video Art in India, Curated by Paul Sternberger and Gayatri Sinha, The Newark Museum, New Jersey

'Autoportraits', Photographic portfolio of 12 Indian artists, Khoj at Freize Art Fair, London

'Gill and Gupta', Two person show with Sunil Gupta, India International Center, New Delhi

'I fear I believe I desire', Curated by Gayatri Sinha, Gallery Espace, New Delhi

2005

‘Women Photographers from SAARC countries', Curated by Alka Pande, Italian Cultural Center, New Delhi

2002

Award Winners Show, Fifty Crows Foundation, San Francisco

1998

'In Black and White' - What has Independence meant for Women, Curated by Bisakha Dutta, Point of View, Lalit Kala Academy, New Delhi; Admit One Gallery, New York

1995

Alliance Francaise prizewinners exhibition, exhibition travelled all over India

Books

1984, document released on Kafila.org, free to download, New Delhi 2013/2014

Balika Mela, published by Edition Patrick Frey, Zurich 2012

The Americans, published by Nature Morte/Bose Pacia 2008

Collections

Museum of Modern Art, New York

Freer and Sackler Galleries of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC

Deutsche Bank Collection, Frankfurt

San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose

National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto

Fotomuseum, Winterthur

Devi Art Foundation, New Delhi

Selected Bibliography

Prajna Desai: The Kids Aren’t All Right, Aperture magazine, 2017

Nabil Ahmed: Negative Moment: Political Geology in the Twenty - First Century, South, documenta 14, Issue 3, 2016

Annalisa Merelli: When an ancient tribal art depicts modern Indian life, Quartz India, 2016

Pooja Pillai: Stitched in Time, Indian Express newspaper, 2016

Nancy Adajania: Bearing Witness: Creations of the “Human Hand” in Gauri Gill’s photography, The Wire, 2016

Reema Gehi: Retellings, Mumbai Mirror newspaper, 2016

Chanpreet Khurana: The art of slowing down, Mint newspaper, 2016

Inderpal Grewal: Gauri Gill and Rajesh Vangad, Fields of Sight, Trans Asia Photography Review, 2015

Portfolio: ‘Another Way of Seeing, Granta magazine, 2015

The Salon: Conversation between Lola Mac Dougall and Gauri Gill, Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism, 2014

Jaideep Mazumdar: ‘Ways of speaking a trillion words, Times of India newspaper, 2014

Somak Ghosal: ‘Eye Spy: The work of mourning’ Mint newspaper, 2014

Deeksha Nath: ‘Violence and Resistance’ Review of Forms of Activism, Frontline magazine, 2014

Geeta Kapur: ‘Aesthetic Bind, Citizen Artist: forms of address, 2013 Jaspreet Singh: ‘Thomas Bernhard in New Delhi’, New York Times, 2013

Avtar Singh: ‘Returning to 1984’, Timeout magazine, New Delhi, 2013

Neha Thirani: 1984, ‘Mumbai’s ‘Focus’ Festival Showcases Women Photographers'. New York Times, 2013

Portfolio: ‘Extra-Urban’, Domus, Mumbai 2012

Aditi Saxton: ‘Do you see what I see’, Review of Balika Mela, Tehelka magazine, 2012

Trisha Gupta: ‘What is the ‘real you’, and other questions about photo portraits’, Sunday Guardian newspaper, 2012

Rosalyn D’Mello: ‘Gauri Gill’s New Book is a Chapter in the Art of Portraiture’, Artinfo.com, 2012

Nao Katagiri: ‘New generation of Indian Artists’, Bird magazine, Tokyo, 2012

Murtaza Vali: ‘Eluding Presence: Portraiture in South Asian Photography’, Trans Asia Photography Review, 2011

Portfolio: ‘Balika Mela’, Inge Morath Foundation, 2011

Portfolio: ‘Nizamuddin at Night’, Civil Lines, Edited by Mukul Kesavan, Kai Friese and Achal Prabhala, Harper Collins, New Delhi 2011

Portfolio: ‘Balika Mela’, Sunday Guardian newspaper, New Delhi 2011

Christopher Lord: ‘Professional and amateur pictures of war-ravaged Kabul on show in London’, Review in The National newspaper, Abu Dhabi 2011

Neha Thirani: ‘The Peacocks on the Periphery’, Review in Times of India newspaper, Mumbai 2010

Zeenat Nagre: ‘State of Discomfort’, Review in Time Out magazine, Mumbai 2010

Anita Dube: ‘Notes on Gauri Gill’s Notes from the Desert’, Art India Magazine, Mumbai 2010

Portfolio: ‘Notes from the Desert’, Du magazine, Zurich, 2010 Maya Kovskaya: Review in www.Artinfo.com, 2010

Jane Mikkelsen: ‘Nomad Land’, Review in Timeout magazine, New Delhi 2010

Mario Cresci and Radu Stern: ‘Future Images – A Collection of the World’s Best Young Photographers’, 24Ore Motta Cultura, Italy 2010

Von Feli Schindler: ‘Bilder des Glücks und der Tristesse’, Review in Tages Anzeiger newspaper, Zurich 2010

Portfolio: ‘Balika Mela Portraits’, Ojodopez, Spain 2010

Portfolio: ‘The Americans’, Gup Magazine, The Netherlands, 2010

Deepanjana Pal: ‘Beyond Photoshop’, Review in The Caravan magazine, New Delhi 2010

Alexander Keefe: ‘On Nizamuddin at Night’, Essay in Marg magazine, Mumbai 2010

Veerangana Solanki: ‘More than a thousand words’, Review in The Economic Times newspaper, New Delhi 2010

Himanshu Bhagat: ‘Art of the Here and Now’, Review in Mint newspaper, New Delhi 2010

Bakirathi Mani: ‘Viewing South Asia, Seeing America: Gauri Gill’s “The Americans”’, Essay in American Quarterly, March 2010

Deeksha Nath: ‘The Americans’, Essay in Special Issue edited by Shaheen Merali, Black, Take on Art Magazine, New Delhi 2010

Nilanjana Roy: 'Fighting for safe passage on Indian Streets', NYT, 2010

Ravi Agarwal: ‘Interview for KHOJ BOOK - Ten years of Khoj Artists’, New Delhi 2010

Paul Sternberger: ‘Me, Myself and India’, Essay in Photographies, London 2009

Christopher Pinney: Comments on The Americans, Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago 2008

Portfolio: ‘Urban Landscapes’, Private Photo Review, France 2009

Marina Budhos: ‘The Uneven Promise of a New Land’, Essay on The Americans, Tehelka magazine, New Delhi

Aveek Sen: ‘Vast Native Thoughts’, Review in Telegraph newspaper, Kolkata 2008

Gayatri Sinha: Essay for The Americans, New Delhi 2008

Holland Cotter: ‘INDIA Public Places/Private Spaces Contemporary Photography and Video Art’, Review in New York Times newspaper, January 2008

Ella Dutta: ‘Holding the city open’, Review in Art India magazine, Mumbai, 2008

Bandeep Singh: ‘Personal Light’, Review in India Today magazine, New Delhi, 2007

Awards/Residencies

2013: Arts Fellow, Rockefeller Foundation, Bellagio, Italy

2013: Wall Art residency, Ganjad village, Maharashtra

2012: Residency at Space 118, Mumbai

2011: Grange Prize, Toronto

2011: Chitrakala Parishath, Bangalore. Residency on New Media organised by Lalit Kala Academy

2005: Photography Residency at Khoj, New Delhi

2002: Fifty Crows Award, San Francisco

2001: Anita Squires Fowler Memorial Fund in Photography, Stanford University

2000: Nathan Oliviera Fellowship, Stanford University

1995: Alliance Francaise National Photography Contest, New Delhi