Viewing Sunil Gupta: Life with a Camera, 1970 – Now

Queer life in focus.

Sunil Gupta has spent more than five decades using photography to document queer lives with intimacy and political urgency. Kettle’s Yard brings this history together in ‘Life with a Camera, 1970 – Now’, a major survey of more than 130 works following a life and career spread across Delhi, Montreal, New York and London.

For Gupta, learning photography and becoming politically active happened at much the same time. ‘Friends and Lovers’ records his social world as a young man in 1970s Montreal, while ‘Christopher Street’, made in 1976, captures New York’s queer community in the years after Stonewall. A decade later, ‘Exiles’ took him to cruising sites and more private locations across Delhi, photographing gay men at a time when their lives had little space to exist in public view.

What gives Gupta’s work much of its power is the intimacy of his encounters and his focus on people themselves. ‘Mr Malhotra’s Party’, made between 2007 and 2012 amid intense campaigning against India’s anti-gay laws, presents its sitters directly across the city. ‘Dissent and Desire’, made with Charan Singh in 2015, moves into more private territory, tracing the everyday lives and relationships of queer people in Delhi.

Across documentary photographs and carefully constructed portraits, one question keeps returning: who gets to be seen, and on whose terms? A compelling and important exhibition well worth the trip to Cambridge.