Gauri Gill started out in her 20s, a Delhi-based photojournalist covering stories right across India. She’d drop in, drop back out, then later find herself wondering what had happened to all the people she had photographed. “In India, as across the world,” says Gill, “the rural is being written out. The city – and AI is an extreme extension of the city – leads us to think we can do everything through machines. But the actual people on the ground – the farmers, the peasants, the Adivasis [the term given to India’s indigenous peoples], the forest-dwellers, who have lived so beautifully and so sustainably on the earth and from whom we should be learning – are being crushed.”
In 1999, Gill saw a young girl being beaten by her teacher at a school near Jodhpur and decided this was something she needed to spend longer on. She pitched a story on village schools. When no commission came, Gill quit her job at a magazine and made her way back to the farthest reaches of Rajasthan, to the Thar desert. She wanted to record what life there was like, especially for women and girls. She could not look away.
