Gauri Gill is a Delhi-based photographer. Among her best-known and most compelling works are her family albums of Indian diaspora communities in America, village communities in northwest India, and Afghan Indians in Delhi. For the last ten years, Gill has been working with rural communities in Rajasthan. In 2003, the NGO Urmul Setu Sansthan organized a Balika Mela, a fair for girls, in the village of Lunkaransar, which was attended by around 1,500 girls from seventy surrounding villages. The event featured stalls, performances, a Ferris wheel, games, magicians, puppet shows, and competitions. In addition to the usual attractions, mock elections were held to sensitize young people to democratic electoral processes. As part of the event, Gill photographed the participants in a temporary photo studio.

At the Mela, I ran a photo booth where girls could get their pictures taken. I had found some elementary props and backdrops, everything we could get in the local village and within our limited budget. Everything was pretty minimal, and since it was dusty and we were outside in the desert, everything was blown away anyway. However, many of the interesting props, such as peacocks and paper hats, were brought by the girls themselves. Individual girls, friends, sisters, girls with their teachers, or whole classes had their pictures taken, and later they received all the black and white prints of their portraits at a reduced price. Some of the girls learned to take photographs in the workshops we organized in May 2003, and two years later, they documented the fair in their turn.

In 2010, Gill returned to the Mela and, after a long hiatus, opened an exhibition of the 2003 portraits. Many of the girls pictured were there again, or others who knew the portraits. Gill photographed again, this time in color. The photographs from 2003 and 2010 are now published together for the first time in an illustrated book by Edition Patrick Frey.