The extensive project (begun in 1999) is a photographic archive of the years Gill has spent visiting her friends among marginalised rural communities in Western Rajasthan-including Jogi nomads, Muslim migrants and Bishnoi peasants. The body of work encompasses various narratives and sub-series within it, and uses different forms of image making. There are photographs structured around performances and portraits - some spontaneous, others created in collaboration with her subjects. It includes posed pictures made in a tent studio on the one hand (Balika Mela); cinema-verite style intimate portraits on the other (Birth Series, Jannat); those that are staged in real life environments; or using negatives made and discarded by others (Ruined Rainbow). The work references vernacular and popular practices of photography and image making often found in and around the village-including the studio portrait, passport photo, religious calendar art and Bollywood posters. The archive also contains images without visible persons, yet containing human presence -for instance, documenting drawings in schools in 'The Mark on the Wall'; and both marked and unmarked graves in 'Traces'.

Gauri hopes to eventually publish the work as a series of individual books-each book a note from the desert. The first one, Balika Mela, was published in 2012.

"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 method embraces 'Time'- which does not 'naturally' exist inside a photograph, beyond the epiphany and commemoration of a moment (photography's melancholy and limitation is precisely this)- within a structure of intimacy and relationships that unravel their mysteries slowly."

Excerpted from Anita Dube's essay: The Desert- Mirror: Reflections on the photographs of Gauri Gill, 2010.

More Information : Notes from the Desert by Gauri Gill