Desert Warriors

postcards. However,when one is documenting a nomadic community that lives on the edge,eking out a living from meagre resources,the temptations of colour recede to the background. Photographer Gauri Gill,after spending over a decade in the desert with different communities and tribes,chose black-and-white as her medium. Her solo show,titled “Notes from the Desert: 1999-2010”,opens at Gallery Nature Morte on March 27,and is a collection of a vast body of work,primarily structured around portraits,some candid and spontaneous,others posed and done in collaboration with the people she has come to know over the years.

Whether they are the Balikas or young girls who live and study in small villages across Rajasthan,the Jogis,a nomadic tribe,or Muslim migrant workers whose homes are now in Rajasthan — what unifies these people and Gill’s work is the leitmotif of the desert. “I think the format one works in is dictated by the subject. Back in 1999,I was inspired to begin this body of work by one particular incident: I was photographing village schools in Rajasthan when I saw a girl being beaten by her teacher in a school in Narlai. It set me thinking,what is it like being a girl in a village school?” says Gill,39,whose journey as a photographer has taken her from documenting American diaspora to looking at the lives of Pakistani and Bangladeshi migrants.

Besides Gill’s quasi-documentary work with the Jogi community and the Muslim migrant works,her Balika Mela series consists of posed photographs where she set up a little ‘studio’ — a kiosk where the girls decided how they were going to be photographed. One image,showing three 11-year-old girls posing as Devis giving their blessings but dressed in their own attire,is filled with dark humour,as is the one where they have chosen paper crowns. “Their deadly serious expression underlines how formal they feel about these photographs since they have never posed for a camera,” observes Gill,who studied photography at the Parsons School of Design in New York in 1994,following it up with an MFA in Photography from Stanford University in California.

Gill was acutely aware of her class privileges while shooting these children. “I am an English speaking person from Delhi,a distant world. In Lunkaransar town,I visited a local family. We sat in their hut,with the snakes and chameleons and rooster under the bed,” she recalls.

But,she adds,she came away enriched from working with the people of the desert. The photographs are a means of sharing that experience.