Pictures of Difference:
Sunil Gupta

In 1976, Sunil Gupta had just moved from Montreal to New York, on an ill-fated mission to study for an MBA (more of that later). There, just a few years after the Stonewall riots and before the fears of the Aids epidemic, he photographed the buzzing streetlife of Manhattan cruising hotspot, Christopher Street.

The joyous atmosphere he captured is in stark contrast to his project a decade later in India, where being gay was illegal.

‘It had always seemed to me that art history seemed to stop at Greece and never properly dealt with gay issues from another place. Therefore, it became imperative to create some images of gay Indian men; they didn't seem to exist,’ he says.

These two juxtaposed sets of work are part of our major exhibition, Masculinities: Liberation through Photography, which looks at how photographers and filmmakers since the 1960s have portrayed what it means to be a man.

With the Centre closed because of government advice about coronavirus, we wanted to share a part of the exhibition with you. We gave Gupta a call at his home studio in south London, to discuss his memories of making the two series.

Born in Delhi in 1953, Gupta moved with his family to Montreal in 1969 before answering the call of the Big Apple a few years later.

‘It was a very exciting time,’ he says. ‘I was only 23 and I’d managed to escape my parents’ city. New York wasn’t too far from Montreal but it was very different as a place to live. There was a lot going on there in both my major spheres of informal interest: to be gay and to be a photographer.’

Gupta first started taking photos for his local gay liberation student group newspaper in Montreal in the early 70s. But it was the excitement of the New York photography scene, with its abundance of galleries and possibilities, that really ignited a fire in him.

‘I was enrolled in business school, studying for an MBA. But New York is so spectacular, especially back then – there was so much of everything. I had come from somewhere that had no photography galleries, and there were over 50 in New York. So I got drawn into photography – I went to talks and exhibitions. Then, after doing a workshop at the New School I dropped out of my MBA and decided to take up photography properly. That gave me more impetus to turn up to galleries with pictures, and it made me more purposeful.’

He says he found himself drawn to taking photos in the city’s neighbourhoods, and his New School education included studying under renowned street photographer Lisette Model. ‘I was attracted to the street partly because the theatricality of New York, but also because everything seemed to happen outside. People lived in tiny places so they spent all their time outdoors. There was all this streetlife, and every neighbourhood was different, so I began purposefully documenting the different areas.

‘Inevitably Christopher Street became my overwhelming interest because of the cruising aspect to it.

‘Photography was definitely a way of cruising for me,’ he says. ‘There were so many people, it was a case of “too many people, not enough time”. I found I could take more pictures than meet people. Because I had that approach – I wasn’t doing a study, it wasn’t anthropology – people were generally fine when I went up to them and asked to take their picture.

‘Also, people were out to promenade on those weekend afternoons when I was taking the pictures. They were dressed up and showing off, they wanted to be looked at.’

A committed activist in the gay liberation movement, Gupta says those heady pre-Aids years were a time when the burgeoning scene was establishing itself, and there was a powerful political approach to promiscuity, which Gupta embraced.

‘The general mood on Christopher Street was very positive. I was very “out and proud” and the whole political underpinning of gay liberation had been about the death of the family – we were going to destroy family-based capitalism through promiscuity. It was very joyful.’

As a student of limited means at the time, Gupta was doing his photo processing in the bathroom of his apartment in the evenings. While he shot a plenty of images, he didn’t print many. ‘I would usually make a contact sheet and do three prints at a time,’ he remembers.

A big part of the city’s photography culture at that time was the idea of photographing and documenting everything. Pre-social media, the idea of capturing everything that was happening was a key concept of the art form at the time. And it’s stayed with Gupta ever since.

‘I’ve been constantly taking pictures ever since,’ he says. ‘It’s like an obsession.’

Ten years later, Gupta was living in London where he was commissioned by the Photographers’ Gallery to document the gay scene in his home city of Delhi. The lack of visibility of gay Indian men was troubling him, and he wanted to do something about it.

‘Everything there was completely different,’ he recalls. ‘Firstly, there was no way to recreate Christopher Street because there was no such public display. That was weird because the streets were full of people, but there just wasn’t the same gay culture. What I found with the project was that it wasn’t possible to be out and proud in India at that time. It was very underground, or happened if people had the opportunity to be away from their home city. I couldn’t live like that, completely in the closet.’

Nonetheless, as the pictures in Exiles show, cruising did happen in public spaces. ‘For a man that’s much simpler in India because men occupy public space and the streets. It transpired that there was lots of sex happening, but no gay culture.’

Gupta’s original plan was to go to the cruising spots, and document them. ‘But I quickly realised these guys don’t want to be seen, so had to change my approach. I recruited a group of volunteers who were happy to be photographed. I explained to them what I was doing – which was quite hard because there wasn’t really any photography culture in India at the time, apart from in print media – and they posed for the shots.

‘Over a few trips I got the pictures for Exiles, processing back in London and taking the photos back to India to show the guys and make sure they were OK with me using them. ‘I took a tape recorder with me and recorded snippets of conversation. These formed the text on the images. They aren’t being spoken by the people in the pictures, they’re things I recorded at other times.’ The series was first shown at an exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery called The Body Politic – Re-presentations of Sexuality in 1987.

Then, in the late 90s, the photos were resurrected at a gallery in Southall in the middle of the Punjabi community. ‘There was an outcry – both for and against, but very vocally against it,’ says Gupta. ‘It ended up with the place being shut and the curator being fired. People were saying that being gay didn’t exist in India, that it was something people learn in Britain. I was quite taken aback. I’d been out and proud for 25 years – I couldn’t believe there was a group of people living in London who thought Indians couldn’t be gay. I suppose I’d been living in a bubble in south London.

‘After that, I didn’t really find an audience for those pictures and they haven’t been seen much since then. It was quite a hard time for me. In the end I just left London and went to live in India. Things really changed when I was there. Now people are happily identifying as queer.’

Gupta’s photos of the gay experience in New York and Delhi showcase one aspect of how photographers have portrayed different aspects of masculinities in our exhibition, which features over 300 images from around the world.

Masculinities: Liberation through Photography is sponsored by CALVIN KLEIN

Interviewed by James Drury for the June 2020 Guide.