New Delhi: The tenth Prix Pictet—a worldwide award for photography and sustainability—has been awarded to Indian photographer Gauri Gill, who will receive 100,000 Swiss Francs. From a group of 12 qualified photographers, an outside panel ultimately settled on Gauri Gill.
Gauri’s work highlights her commitment to ‘active listening,’ the process through which she engages with and serves the community. She has worked closely with underprivileged people in the desert of western Rajasthan, Northern India, for over two decades, and for the last decade, she has collaborated with Indigenous artists in Maharashtra.
In April of 1999, she went out to photograph local schools in Rajasthan for her award-winning series “Notes from the Desert.” She had spent much of her life in urban settings and quickly realised that rural schools reflected a complicated reality she had never experienced.
She spent decades paying repeated visits to the same communities, during which time she saw it all: famines, floods, dust storms, diseases, overcrowded hospitals, underfunded schools, festivals, feuds, celebrations, and prayers.
For a collection of photographs showing, among other topics, a child in bare feet, an elderly patient sticking her tongue out during a medical check-up, a family seated in a dark room, staring straight into the camera, a girl hanging upside-down from a tree with another girl holding her head, a young woman using a hand mirror, etc. Indian photographer Gauri Gill has received the renowned Prix Pictet, a worldwide prize for photography and sustainability, for her work documenting life in rural Rajasthan.
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The Prix Pictet is hailed as the most prestigious environmental photography prize in the world. The Pictet Group Award for Environmental Photography was established in 2008 by the Swiss multinational private bank and financial services corporation to use photography as a tool to bring attention to pressing environmental concerns throughout the world.
Participants must be nominated by one of more than 300 art critics, curators, and other experts in the visual arts from across the world who are part of the Prix Pictet’s worldwide network of nominators.
