Sunil Gupta, a photographer known for his longstanding exploration of queer identities, is set to have a retrospective exhibition at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge from September 19 through January 31. His work, spanning more than five decades, documents the complexities of gay life across different geographies and eras, drawing upon his experiences as an Indian-born artist raised in Canada and residing in the United Kingdom since 1978.
Gupta’s photographic practice deliberately navigates the intersection of public and private realms, blending documentary and staged imagery to reflect evolving social and political contexts surrounding queer communities. Early in his career, he encountered institutional resistance, including a government shutdown of an exhibition in India and hesitance from gallery curators in the UK, where his openness about his sexuality challenged prevailing norms.
Among his notable images is a photograph from his “Christopher Street” series, capturing a rare presence of a person of color in New York’s historic gay neighborhood during the late 1970s. Gupta recalls the significance of this representation at a time when Asian visibility in queer spaces was limited. Another formative work emerged from his 1982 return to Delhi, where he confronted the prevailing silence around homosexuality by creating headless portraits of men, an attempt to visually register the existence of queer desire in a society devoid of open dialogue on the subject.
In the early 1990s, Gupta engaged with digital montage techniques in his “Trespass Series,” situating German unification within the broader conversation about European integration and its implications for Commonwealth migrants’ rights. Tackling themes of family and belonging, his “Pretended Family Relationships” project responded to Section 28, legislation that prohibited local authorities from promoting homosexuality, by photographing multiracial couples—often staged due to the reluctance of Black and Asian models to publicly identify as queer.
Gupta’s subsequent work includes his 2005 return to India, captured in the “Love and Light” series, which chronicles personal and intimate moments alongside his ongoing HIV activism. His relationship with social worker Charan Singh began amid this period at an AIDS conference in Delhi. In 2007, Gupta turned his lens to an Indian village in Rajasthan, exploring identity and belonging through the lens of familial history and the tensions of being both insider and outsider.
Other significant series include “Sun City,” a visual homage referencing gay photographic history and iconography, and “Black Experience,” a 1986 project commissioned by the Greater London Council that addressed the complexities of racial identity among Asian and Black communities in Britain at the time.
Gupta’s later projects are marked by reflections on living with HIV. The “Homelands” series, produced during a fellowship in Southampton, captures the intersections of personal health struggles and cultural heritage. In “Exiles,” a commission from the Photographers’ Gallery in London during the mid-1980s, he documented Indian gay men in Delhi, combining portraiture with recorded interviews to convey the nuanced realities of queer existence there. This body of work was recently acquired by New York’s Museum of Modern Art, signaling recognition of its cultural significance.
Throughout his career, Gupta has aimed to insert marginalized queer narratives into broader cultural histories, a mission underscored by his persistence in making visible those often overlooked in mainstream accounts. His retrospective at Kettle’s Yard offers an expansive view of this effort, tracing shifts in representation, identity, and social acceptance from the 1970s to the present.