Interview with Gauri Gill
Gauri Gill speaks with SAVAC about her latest project: The Americans; which is on show at the Mississauga Central Library until 31 August, 2011.
In 1992 I went to NYC to study photography. I lived with family out in Long Island, and soon began to photograph this new world – including my Aunt, who moved to the U.S. after she got married, my cousins who grew up in America, their grandparents and many friends. I found myself in a world at once familiar and yet quite alien – it was like we had all landed on the moon. Placed in that new context – our lives, homes, other gestures assumed other meanings ... in a sense it put everything up for question. But there was also something thrilling about the dislocation and self creation, the whole process of 'assimilation'. I would continually meet people from the sub-continent like Chiman Bhai, the great old newpaper seller at Penn Station: the kind of leap he had made through space and time and history – from rural Gujarat to the heart of NYC – boggled my mind. It was also a little schizophrenic because every day when I went to college in the city I was surrounded by talented and privileged classmates who knew little of those other worlds. On visits to the Met or Moma I saw versions of America that were quite different from what I was living. So I suppose I wished for my work to reflect and honour my own experience, and very particular individuals that I could relate to ... and also perhaps to raise the question – who is American?
How did you go about shooting these photos? Did you work with a crew?
No. There was no crew or fancy lights. It was pretty low tech. What I am often trying to do is just be fully present and available, to find my own way into where I am and who I'm with, and I don't like the equipment to get in the way. It was shot on small format cameras with 35 mm film - drug store film quite often, professional film when I could afford it. I also had no large intentions in the early days - of shows etc, or even of how and where the work would end. It was only when I went back to California in 2000 that I knew I wanted to focus on this story in a more concentrated way. It still took seven years after that for me to finish it.
How did you find and work with your subjects? Who was the most interesting person?
Well, much of the roadmap was provided by family and friends. Like many Punjabis, I have family all over the States. Through them I met others, or I would hear about things, or they would have ideas for me. Then as the story unfolded it developed its own momentum – for instance, I wanted to meet and learn about some of the earliest immigrants so I went out to Yuba City. Or a Gujarati friend told me about Matrimonial Conferences which sounded quite marvellous and I was compelled to visit one. There are so many great regional subcultures within the larger community. Sometimes I would find out about local events in Desi newspapers or websites such as yours. At one point I became very curious about what was going on in the South, so I made a road trip where I met all kinds of people, literally in the middle of nowhere. Out in Alabama, through a friend's sister, I met a woman called Rajesh who worked in a hospital. As a child in the village in India she had an accident, and was brought to America by a visiting Uncle who said he would take care of her medical treatment. In college she fell in love with the most handsome basketball player, he was also black, her family promptly disowned her. She married him, they had two daughters. Some years on, he had an accident, and when I met them he was on disability. His father had worked in the cotton factories but his parents couldn't read or write, so Rajesh would help them file their papers for Social Security and other benefits. I spent Father's Day with them in a clapboard church singing the gospel, she was the only woman there in a salwar kameez, at the heart of this family, and I thought maybe this is as far out on the frontier as it is possible to be. Incredibly brave ... it was a love story greater than "Mississippi Masala."
So many stories ... up on a hill in South Carolina, we came upon a very dignified seventy-year-old math school teacher from Baroda who was now running a rundown motel along with his wife. He had immigrated quite recently to try and and get his children in India Green Cards, he had been sponsored by his brother who was American. He said guests would check in and make off with the TVs and refrigerators, and that there were seventeen reports with the police at that point. I thought, what turns life does take.
You lived in the USA while you worked on this project. What was that like? How did it inform this work?
Yes, I lived in the USA for five years. The experience was quite vast and varied and certainly different from any ideas I had had about it prior. Yes, it informed me in all sorts of ways. It continues to do so. And these days one sees the USA everywhere in New Delhi. So maybe I should continue with the series, but on home ground.
What do you hope viewers in Mississauga will get from the work?
I suppose what one gets out of any work really, to be taken out of one's own limited experience and at the same time to be brought back to it, see it with fresh eyes. I am also excited that there is a concurrent exhibition of photographs taken by locals of Mississauga. It's called "The Mississaugans." Stories from the margins must enter the mainstream for it to be alive ... of course then there will be other margins.
"Gauri Gill: The Americans" is on show at the Mississauga Central Library until 31 August, 2011. For details visit www.savac.net
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MyBindi.com is a proud sponsor of "Gauri Gill: The Americans"
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