A powerfully built man wearing a chignon and maang tikka reclines regally on a bolster. With his bold gaze, he could be Manet’s Olympia, but unlike the naked woman of the painting, the man in this photograph wears a black blouse and an emerald green silk sari whose brilliant red border counterpoints the cherry of the bolster. The photograph of this bejeweled, queenly (pun intended) man flies in the face of our idea of the reviled and impoverished transgender people who go around begging for alms. Part of a brightly coloured series titled The New Pre-Raphaelites, this image was created in 2008 by photographer, archivist, writer and HIV activist Sunil Gupta as a response to Article 377, which was dropped 10 years later.
Young and gay
It is among the 154 works (in 16 series) on display in Gupta’s first major retrospective, From Here to Eternity , that opened in The Photographers’ Gallery in London on October 9, 2020. It’s currently closed owing to the ongoing lockdown in
‘India Gate’ (From the series ‘Exiles’)
the U.K. Over a career spanning 45 years, the Indian-born Canadian photographer has often used staged images. Photography is a natural corollary to his interest in cinema that developed in his early years in Delhi. Gupta is currently based in London.
The retrospective collates Gupta’s work from various periods, recording the life of a gay man of Indian origin as he moves from place to place and documents changes in society’s attitude towards homosexuality. “What does it mean to be a gay Indian man? This is the question that follows me around everywhere I go and is still ever present in my work,” he says.
In 1969, Gupta moved from Delhi’s Nizamuddin to Montreal, Canada, with his family. He started taking photographs there and later in New York, little knowing that in a few years’ time his work would be hailed as a milestone of gay activism, granting visibility to a community hitherto hidden behind society’s front of ‘normality’.
Gupta’s earliest body of work ( Friends & Lovers ) documents in black and white Montreal’s gay lib demonstrations, which bristle with placards. To be young, as he was then, indeed was very heaven, with unbridled promiscuity its natural extension. Montreal was the hotbed of the gay liberation movement in the 70s — for Gupta, even old Europe with its accoutrements of culture, couldn’t compare with it.
By 1976, he was in New York with his boyfriend, discovering the flamboyant and carefree habitués of Christopher Street. The photographs from this period feature hunky men in tight jeans and leather with whom the artist evidently felt a deep sense of kinship.
Emboldened generation
Arriving in London in the early 80s, Gupta felt the toxicity of racism and homophobia for the first time. The black-and-white
‘Manpreet’ (from the series ‘Mr. Malhotra’s Party’)
photographs of local black people — a term that covered those who lived in the former British colonies — show them as ‘types’, at work and leisure. There’s a solitary shot of himself with his boyfriend, the neon sign of a cinema screening My Beautiful Laundrette (about soured race relations) glowing behind them.
In 1986, Gupta returned to India in the hope of photographing the Indian gay scene. It was nowhere in sight. Frustrated, he staged scenes of romantic encounters ( Exiles ) with the deserted monuments of Delhi in the background. His models were willing to be photographed so long as their faces were not visible. By 2011, things had changed. The images from this period feature Indians of a new emboldened generation posing proudly in public places with crowds swirling around them.
When the occasion demanded, Gupta could be confrontational. He stripped himself bare before the camera physically and emotionally after he was diagnosed as HIV+ in 1995. Labelled as the “gay scourge”, the HIV/AIDS epidemic had played havoc with thousands of lives by then. The London retrospective unflinchingly charts the transformation of Gupta’s own body from that of a sexy young adult in briefs to a flaccid mass of flesh as age and disease prey upon it. He has even portrayed himself as a corpse.
Object of desire
‘No sex, no life’ — that could be Gupta’s credo. He has no qualms about projecting himself as an object of desire because libido is central to the gay liberation movement and to his art. His personal life and experience blend inseparably with his activism and particular brand of aesthetics.
Sunil Gupta
The retrospective is curated by the London-based cultural historian, Mark Sealy, who specialises in the relationship of photography to social changes, identity politics and human rights. Speaking about Gupta, Sealy says: “There is no one single methodology behind the curatorial ethos of this exhibition other than in Sunil Gupta, we have an incredible honest and committed artist who has social change at his core.”
What cameras does Gupta use? His answer is characteristic: “I’m very promiscuous. Mostly Nikons, Leicas and Hasselblads. I made Exiles on an ancient Rolleiflex with a 75 mm lens... It is all digital now. Just got a digital Leica body that takes my old lenses. Difference is mainly in the lenses. All the prints are digital,” he says.
In his youth, Gupta wanted to break away from his biological family. With the new millennium, he has embarked on a journey to rediscover his extended biological family in the Uttar Pradesh village where his father was born. The pandemic has confined him to London for the time being but he is not giving up.
The writer focuses on Kolkata’s vanishing heritage and culture.
