Indian photographer Gauri Gill was announced as the winner of the tenth cycle of the Prix Pictet, the global award for photography and sustainability, receiving the prize of 100,000 Swiss Francs. Gauri Gill was selected from a shortlist of 12 photographers by an independent jury.

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Gill’s work emphasises her belief in working with and through community, in what she calls ‘active listening’. For more than two decades, she has been engaged closely with marginalised communities in the desert of western Rajasthan, and for the last decade with Indigenous artists in Maharashtra.

Her winning series ‘Notes from the Desert’ looks at whole spectrum of life: drought years and the year of a great monsoon - when Barmer became Kashmir.

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On my many visits to rural Rajasthan, I have witnessed a complex reality I knew nothing about as a city dweller. To live poor and landless in the desert amounts to an inescapable reliance on oneself, on each other, and on nature. These fragments of shared experience now inhabit a large photographic archive called Notes from the Desert, encompassing different narratives and varied forms of image making.’

Gauri Gill

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In a world facing unprecedented challenges, from social inequality to environmental crises, it was crucial to turn the lens towards humanity itself. The theme "Human" which we announced in July 2022, already provides a platform to explore the complexities, vulnerabilities, and strengths of the human condition. It allows the artists to capture and communicate the stories, struggles, and triumphs of individuals and communities around the globe. Through this theme, Prix Pictet aims to foster a deeper understanding of our shared humanity and inspire meaningful conversations about the issues that impact us all. Especially when thinking about the theme Human, I strongly believe that instead of the future of photography, we should think about photography for the future. The power of the image lies in its ability to foreground critical and urgent environmental issues in a visually impactful yet direct way.

Isabelle von Ribbentrop, Executive Director of Prix Pictet

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As the Prix Pictet marks its tenth cycle, the choice of Human for the theme signifies a reflection on the journey thus far. It encapsulates the evolution of the prize, acknowledging the central role of humanity in shaping the sustainability discourse. The jury considered an exceptional group of visual storytellers, each of whom demonstrate a highly distinctive approach to the theme. This led to a rich debate amongst the jury before their unanimous decision that Gauri Gill was a worthy winner of Prix Pictet Human.

Renaud de Planta, Pictet’s Senior Managing Partner

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Artist Statement
Notes from the Desert, 1999–ongoing

In April 1999, I set out to photograph village schools in Rajasthan. Some months before,
I had witnessed a girl being beaten by her teacher and I had been dwelling upon it. Back in Delhi, I proposed an essay to the political weekly where I worked about what it was like being a girl in a village school, but I was told my idea lacked a “news peg” or a subject that more urban readers might relate to. I decided to take a month-long sabbatical and spend it in rural Rajasthan.

I started by travelling from school to school, crisscrossing the state through Jaipur, Jodhpur, Osiyan, Bikaner, Barmer, Phalodi, Baran, and Churu districts, photographing mainly in the villages. In the town of Lunkaransar, I visited an experimental school for nomadic Jogi children. I met Urma and Halima, who invited me home with them and introduced me to Bhana Nathji, Urma’s father and a respected community leader. He was to become my friend and sage guide until he passed away in 2019. We sat in their mud home, on the bed with the snakes and chameleons and rooster underneath, Urma’s brothers and their hunting dogs around us, and Bhana Nathji invited me to travel with them.

In Barmer district, lost, I came upon a group of women in dark ajrak shawls standing around the corpse of a little girl. They looked intimidating, but one of them, Izmat, grasped my hands and, with a conviction born of her own great suffering, impressed upon me that, on my return to Delhi, I must tell people of the troubles of those in Barmer. She took my address and, in letters dictated to literate acquaintances, urged me to return. I did.

Looking at schools opened out a world. I realised school was only the microcosm of a complex reality I knew nothing about, having grown up mainly in cities. On my numerous visits to western Rajasthan, to meet with essentially the same people and places, I have witnessed the whole spectrum of life: drought years and the year of a great monsoon — when Barmer became Kashmir, dust storms that can give you a fever and a flood bad enough for Urma’s home to need rebuilding. I have followed the farming cycle, migration, men travelling to work in Gujarat and Maharashtra, Food for Work programmes, MNREGA and other government schemes, nomadic journeys, epidemics, cerebral malaria, tuberculosis, overwhelmed hospitals and understaffed schools, death from snakebite, from accidents, from being burned alive for providing an inadequate dowry, from growing old, the death of a camel in a year remembered as the year of the death of the camel, births, marriages, child marriages, moneylenders, dharnas, national
and panchayat elections, festivals, feuds passed down over generations, celebrations, prayers ... and, through it all, my friends, by whom I was led.

To live poor and landless in the desert amounts to an inescapable reliance on oneself, on each other, and on nature. The stakes are high, the elements close, and life is as cheap as the jokes are rampant. To sleep out on the icy-cold dunes in the winter, with only some tarpaulin and heavy old quilts, means everyone must huddle in, and breathe collectively into the quilt, along with the dogs. One isn’t quite sure what is what or who is who in the tangle.

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Biography

Born Chandigarh, India, 1970
Lives and works in New Delhi, India

Gill’s work emphasises her belief in working with and through community, in what she calls “active listening”. For more than two decades, she has been engaged closely with marginalised communities in the desert of western Rajasthan, and for the last decade with Indigenous artists in Maharashtra. Gill studied at Delhi College of Art, Parsons School of Design, New York, and Stanford University, California. Her work has been shown internationally, including at the Whitechapel Gallery, London(2010), The Wiener Holocaust Library, London(2014), San José Museum of Art, California(2015), and the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in Kerala, India (2016). In 2017, Gill’s work was exhibited at Documenta 14, Athens and Kassel, the 7thMoscow Biennale, Prospect 4, New Orleans, and Centre Pompidou, Paris. It has been shown at Museum Tinguely, Basel (2018), MoMA PS1,New York (2018), the 58th Venice Biennale(2019), National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa(2019), Chobi Mela, Dhaka (2019), and BAMPFA, Berkeley, California (2020).

Gill’s first major survey exhibition opened at Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, in 2022, moving to Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark, in January 2023.

She also exhibits at locations outside the art world, including public libraries, rural schools and non-profit institutions. Her work is held by institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Tate Modern, London, Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, and Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland.

Her awards include the Grange Prize, awarded by the Art Gallery of Ontario (2011), and an India Today Art Award in 2018. She has been a Creative Arts Fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, Italy (2013), and was the inaugural Roberta Denning Visiting Artist at Stanford (2022). Gill has recently published books with Edition Patrick Frey about
her collaborations with rural artists, Acts of Appearance (2022) and Fields of Sight (2023)

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Human

To accompany the exhibition, Hatje Cantz have published Human, a book featuring the shortlisted photographers together with a selection of outstanding images from a  wider group of those nominated for the award. The publication also features essays by the historian David Christian and writer Meehan Crist and a special interview with  photographer Sebastião Salgado, the great champion of humanitarian photography, by Michael Benson, the Director of the Prix Pictet.

During the award ceremony, Prix Pictet also announced the launch of a new initiative, the Prix Pictet People’s Choice Award. The Award allows the public to vote for their favourite shortlisted series, and seeks to create dialogue around the vital issues the  prize explores. The winner of the People’s Choice Award will be announced at the close of the exhibition. Voting is cast online via Prix Pictet’s website.

Following its time at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the exhibition will embark on a  global tour during which it will be shown at leading museums in Zürich, Istanbul,  Dublin, Bangkok, Munich, San Diego, Singapore and Stockholm.

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