A brush with... Sunil Gupta
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How did Sunil Gupta first become interested in photography as a child in India?
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Hello, I'm Ben Luke, and welcome to A Brush With, the podcast from the Art Newspaper, in which I talk to artists about their influences from writers to musicians and of course other artists and the cultural experiences that have shaped their lives and work. And this episode is a brush with Sunil Gupta, and you can watch this conversation as a video on the YouTube channels of the Art newspaper and Bloomberg Connects. Across more than half a century, Sunil Gupta. Gupta has explored queer identity, migration, and race through photography. Born in New Delhi in 1953, but based in Canada and the UK as well as India since he became an artist, Sunil has reflected on his personal background and autobiography to explore a wealth of social and political themes, from queer desire and relationships to the social and geographical environments in which LGBTQ life and love happens.
To political violence and the oppression of queer people, and the HIV AIDS crisis and its legacy. He said that he couldn't separate the living from the art making. Working in series that often have novel conceptual structures and explore different modes of presentation and expression in the photographic space, Sunil is both an artist and activist with a long held conviction to represent his own experience and that of people and communities like him. Like him in cultural fields where they've largely been absent. As I say, Sunil was born in 1953 in New Delhi, but in 1969 he moved with his father, mother, and sister to Montreal. Initially, he studied accountancy there at Concordia University, but as we'll hear, while he was there, he began to develop his interest in photography.
He also became involved in the gay liberation movement at the university. His earliest photographs gathered under The title Friends and Lovers coming out in Montreal in the 1970s include intimate snapshots with the gay family he embraced, but also protest and reportage-like images, for instance, of Aquarius, the bathhouse that was firebombed in 1975, killing three people. His romantic relationship at that time took him to New York, purportedly to study for an MBA. But while in New York, Sunil took classes at the New School with a photographic. Photographer Lizette Modell, who taught Diane Arbus. She convinced him to leave his business studies and take up the camera in earnest. He made one of his best-known series while there, Christopher Street from 1976, capturing anonymous men alone or in couples and groups as they walked along this street at the heart of Queer New York, in a kind of Hausian period between the Stonewall Uprising and the AIDS crisis.
Here, Sunil's gaze through his camera became One of desire. He said that taking the Christopher Street images was his way of having everybody without having to stop and have sex with them. He left New York for the UK in late 1977, again following his then partner. He went on to study at the West Surrey College of Art and Design in Farnham in Surrey, and then at the Royal College of Art in London. While he was studying, he returned to India for the first time as an adult and made series that. Developed themes he'd explored in Montreal and New York. Though homosexuality was illegal in early 1980s India, still Sunil found that gay men had a presence in Delhi and in towards an Indian gay image, he attempted to capture scenes of queer affection, often set in dramatic landscapes and vistas.
In cruising 1960s Delhi, meanwhile, he sought to capture his teenage cruising grounds, again reflecting his consistent balance of subjectivity. And objectivity. These black and white series are a prelude to the later colour photography and text project Exiles, made between 1986 and 1987, which we discuss in the conversation.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
How did Sunil Gupta first become interested in photography as a child in India?
0:03–11:37
2
What role did the gay liberation movement at Concordia University play in shaping Gupta’s early work?
11:37–19:56
3
How did the Christopher Street series capture queer desire in 1970s New York?
19:56–27:16
4
Why did Gupta shift from documentary photography to more conceptual, text‑image projects like Exiles?
27:16–36:16
5
How did the AIDS crisis influence Gupta’s personal and artistic practice in the 1990s?
36:16–44:34
6
What motivated Gupta to create the colour portrait series ‘Country Portraits of an Indian Village’?
44:34–52:03
7
How do film, Bollywood, and the work of Chris Marker inform Gupta’s later projects such as Sun City?
52:03–59:12
8
What does Sunil Gupta believe is the ultimate purpose of art?
59:12–1:07:28