Description
Sunil Gupta’s story unfolds in this artist’s monograph. His autobiographical photographs, both political and intimate, address being a gay Indian man in Europe living between cultures. Born in New Delhi in 1953, Gupta grew up in Montreal before studying photography in New York and London. Initially choosing reportage photography to express himself, he later moved to a more inventive, fictional style, integrating details of his domestic life and his fight against HIV with a broader political agenda. Gupta’s work has been widely published and exhibited in North America and Europe (including at the Tate Gallery, London). It has a seminal place in the story of Black artists’ engagement with issues of personal and cultural identity.
• the first in a new series of Autograph monographs
• the first monograph surveying Gupta’s career to date
• features 146 photographs from nine series (1984 – 2003), accompanied by Gupta’s text
• accompanying exhibitions in the UK, New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, and New Delhi
“Determined to break the silence surrounding masculinity, male sexuality, and desire, what really propels the work is the drama of confronting the tensions which have shaped his experience and his practice – between tradition and modernity, being a gay Indian man, educated and living in the West; between public and private, personal and political, the body and the body politic. His courageous address to these issues has given a decisive shape to the contemporary debate about the difference.” Stuart Hall
ISBN: 9780954281328
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).
