How photography is merging reportage with art

The role of photojournalism as a tool for documenting social change has been shrinking in Indian media. So photographers are reinventing the form with the encouragement of mainstream art galleries

- Shweta Upadhyay

Two years ago, photographer Gauri Gill became the first Indian to receive the prestigious Prix Pictet photography prize for her documentary series, Notes from the Desert.

From nomadic journeys to farming cycles, drought to dust storms, festivals to feuds, the minutiae of daily life of marginalised rural communities across Barmer, Lunkaransar and Osiyan in western Rajasthan is captured in this decades-long project. An adolescent girl looks at her reflection in a hand mirror, an elderly woman sticks out her tongue for examination in a clinic, a woman is camouflaged by the leaves of a tree on which she is sitting... through such expressive images of the everyday, Gill maps the patterns and passage of time in the desert.

But when Gill first pitched the project to a weekly magazine in 1999, it was rejected for it had "no news peg" and was unlikely to cater to a mostly urban audience. This prompted Gill to take a sabbatical—and ultimately leave photojournalism—to engage deeply with rural communities, which resulted in projects like Notes from the Desert (1999-ongoing), Acts of Appearance (2015-ongoing), featuring performative portraits of residents of a Maharashtra village known for mask-making, and Fields of Sight (2013-ongoing) in which Gill seamlessly combines images of landscapes in rural Maharashtra with over-inscribing by Warli artist Rajesh Vangad to communicate two distinct ways of seeing.

Over the years the myopia of Indian mainstream media has led to a decline in photojournalism, an important strand of documentary photography for raising awareness, storytelling and social change.

At a time when self-published photo books and interdisciplinary photo installations are flourishing, documentary work too is morphing and transforming to acquire a new shape. It is expanding its scope and blurring the lines with conceptual photography in its format and feel.