Description
Delhi: Communities of Belonging (The New Press, November 2016) by noted photographers Sunil Gupta and Charan Singh offers a powerful series of more than 150 photographs and companion first-person texts, which together offer an unprecedented portrait of LGBTQ people’s lives in India today. Focusing on the city of Delhi, Gupta and Singh chronicle the halting emergence of networks of men and women living under the shadow of stigma and criminalized behaviour —in a country where anti-sodomy laws dating back to the British Empire were recently struck down, only to be reaffirmed in a surging wave of homophobia.
The photographs reflect the photographers’ celebrated capacity for entering into lives rarely seen. Through seventeen unique stories, Delhi invites the viewer into the daily routines, work, homes, and intimate lives of their subjects from different backgrounds—from urban professionals to day labourers.
ISBN: 978-1-62097-265-6
Sunil Gupta (born in New Delhi in 1953) is a photographer, curator, writer, and activist. Gupta migrated to Canada at the age of fifteen. He was educated in photography at the New School, New York (1976) and the Royal College of Art, London (1983). Over a career spanning more than four decades, Gupta has maintained a visionary approach to photography, producing bodies of work that are pioneering in their social and political commentary. The artist’s diasporic experience of multiple cultures informs a practice dedicated to themes of race, migration, and queer identity–his own lived experience was a point of departure for photographic projects, born from a desire to see himself and others like him represented in art history. Gupta’s work has been exhibited internationally and published in numerous monographs and catalogues, including Christopher Street, 1976 (2018) and From Here to Eternity (2020).
