Gupta, who was born in India, brought up in Canada and moved to the UK in 1978 after two years studying in New York, has documented and described queer lives for five decades. In his work, he’s quietly tried to find new ways of seeing, exploring the potential of photography to blur fiction and reality, public space and intimate, clandestine moments. His work explores the ways we love and relate to one another, set against the ever-shifting tides of politics and society.
He photographs with love – but it hasn’t been without risk. An exhibition in India was once shut down by the government, and in his early days in the UK, when he was working with fellow photographer Tessa Boffin, he recalls curators “physically shrinking away when we walked in the room – two queers in leather were too much for them! But we were quite aggressively upfront with our sexualities, we weren’t shy about it.” Ahead of his retrospective exhibition at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge, Gupta talks through 10 landmark images from across his career.
This is almost the only photograph in this series that prominently features a person of colour; it was unusual to see Asian people on Christopher Street in New York at the time, and I saw myself a little bit in the person on the right. These two in the foreground are very much what I remember from that time: you get the hair and clothes because you want to look the part, and you find someone to hang out with. Behind them is the counterfoil: the regular gay guys who parade up and down Christopher Street – but here, they’re in the background.
I also like the lone figure further down the street – there’s something about the loneliness of cruising on the street. This picture is defining because I’d gone back to Delhi for the first time. I had grown up next to this tomb, which is why it keeps reappearing in the work.
I was trying to find a way of photographing gay men in Delhi, but this was circa 1982 – nobody would be in a picture. There was complete silence around the subject of homosexuality. Even people who went out to have sex in public places – there was no chitchat, no language around it.
So I began to take headless pictures but it wasn’t really going anywhere. But I liked this, and it made my degree show at the RCA. When I graduated, my livelihood was freelancing.
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