“Men holding hands or lying on each other’s laps is not a problem – it looks very romantic (from the outside), but they mostly just hang out,” he said in a video interview from the UK, before recalling: “I aroused more interest than them because I was standing there with a tripod and a camera, so everyone was on me.”
Gupta, who lived in New Delhi until his teens, knew this from personal experience. “I passed that place on my way to school every day for 11 years,” he said. “All you had to do was get off the bus and have sex on the way home. It was really easy.”
Concerned about his subjects’ “outing”, Gupta treated them as collaborators in what he called a “constructed documentary” approach. After taking his pictures and developing the film in London, he returned to Delhi with printed contact sheets to ensure the men were familiar with the pictures he had selected for his show.
“There was quite a bit of chatter in the pictures,” he said of the India Gate shooting. “And there were other pictures that were (more evocative)… So I chose a tamer one to put in the series.”
The other ethical challenge, he recalled, was communicating to the duo how the images would be used — and the art of shooting itself.
“It wasn’t for publication, and the only way they saw pictures was in a magazine, so it took some explaining,” he said, adding, “Then I tried to explain the process.”
Gupta noted that for many at the time, photography was still “a very mysterious thing that only a few people did in a dark room.”
For ‘the canon’
Now one of India’s most celebrated photographic artists, Gupta often spoke of LGBTQ experiences in his explorations of race, immigration and identity. While studying in the US in the mid-1970s, he produced a now-celebrated series of photographs of New York’s Christopher Street, capturing the city’s gay scene in the years between the Stonewall riots and the start of the AIDS epidemic.
Although “Exiles” presented a rare portrait of gay life outside the West, Gupta’s intended audience was always back in London. Homophobia was rife in 1980s Britain, and the photographer said he faced “a lot of animosity” at art school for creating work related to his sexuality.
“I couldn’t make gays work, and I couldn’t make gays work about India, especially,” he said. “There wasn’t one in the library for reference. So I thought, ‘I’ll make it my mission to make some. Not for India, but for this canon – we need gay Indian guys in our library, in our art schools, here.'”
“It didn’t make any impact when it was first shown,” Gupta said of his debut. “I think it was too early.”
However, interest in Gupta’s work grew in the 1990s, as art made by and about gay people of color became increasingly visible in the West. The fact that “Exiles” can now be seen in India, where he said it was received positively, also testifies to changes in the subcontinent.
A recording from the series “Exiles”. Credit: Courtesy of Sunil Gupta/Vadehra Art Gallery
“I think it’s become historic enough that people are curious about what gay life was like before Grindr and the internet,” Gupta said. “People think it was all doom and gloom, and people were jumping off buildings. They don’t seem to appreciate that we kind of had a life back then too.”
This is a message that is reflected in the photographer’s carefree India Gate shoot, which he recounts as a relaxed day of fun and abundant sunlight.
“It just seemed like a lot of fun. It was a fun day out, and I got to hang out with these guys having a good time and laughing.”