Photographer Sunil Gupta has been documenting and creating art about gay life since the 1970s. Intensely personal, his experiences as an Indian man living in North American culture is a crucial as his gay identity, the works expand to encompass us all. The Ryerson Image Centre at Ryerson is hosting a retrospective that traces Gupta's work through the decades. It is as historically fascinating as it is moving and full of beauty.
The exhibit begins when Gupta and his family had immigrated to Montreal in 1969. Gupta promptly came out and his apartment became a gathering place for the nascent LGBTQ community. He also began to work for Gayzette and photographed the first demonstrations for gay rights. These photos, while powerful, are almost snapshots, Gupta having a skill for capturing the right moment and documenting it. It also includes some family photos, of which there will be many more throughout the exhibition, and he notes drily that "they thought it was a phase, but it wasn't." The photos resonate with the power of chosen family and the extra power of people staring into the camera and proclaiming that they are proud to be gay.
By 1976, Gupta was in New York City and he produced his iconic photos of the men of Christopher Street. As he notes, "I spent my weekends cruising with my camera. It was the heady days after Stonewall and before AIDS when were young and busy." The photos show men of the time walking on Christopher Street which was then the epicentre of gay life. What is remarkable is how often Gupta captures the surreptious, or even blatant, looks that men give each other. The eyelines are crucial, these men are cruising and the photos throb with an innocent eroticism and longing. Historical documents that are heartbreaking and subtly finessed.
From there Gupta's work expands and explores. The descriptions on the gallery walls are invaluable as they place the work in context though each photo is quite capable of standing on its own. Gupta tries to replicate the Christopher Street photographs in India but the men do not want to be seen on camera. He experiments with text and collage, photographing Indian cruising spots and adding quotes. It is a far cry from the liberation of Christopher Street and one feels Gupta's empathy for these men. Decades later he returns to India to photograph those who are willing and out. Vivid colours and staring unabashedly into the camera, the photos shout with joy and defiance.
There are samples from Gupta's famous "Lovers: Ten Years On" from 1984 that I remember seeing in one of the then many gay publications. Having broken up with his lover of a decade and with the plague in its full poisonous bloom, Gupta created portraits of couples who had been together for 10 years or more. Seeing them as full size prints is far more moving than the wonder I felt seeing them on a printed page. Again Gupta concentrates on the eyes staring at the camera but also manages to include numerous details of the decor and backgrounds that emphasize the couple's relationship and their place in gay history. They are magnificent.
When Gupta himself became HIV+ in 1999, he created the series "From Here to Eternity," contrasting his experiences navigating the then limited treatment options and the unlimited stigmas. This photos, haunting on their own, are collaged with photos of the entranceways to bathhouses and sex clubs that were so much a part of gay life. The effect is disturbing but not judgmental and oddly liberating. Gay spirit was indomitable as is Gupta.
There are also works contrasting the difficulties and joys of interracial relationships with the uprising against Thatcher's Section 28. An attempt to repeat the spirit of the Christopher Street photos in London (the British must cruise much more under the radar). And the glorious "Pre-Raphaelites" series where Gupta's evolution from documenting to staging bursts into full fruition. Gupta is a spiritual brother to Kent Monkman but using the Indian diaspora as his inspiration/flash point and a camera lens instead of brushes.
The last series in the exhibit is "Sun City" which is also the most recent. The description references "the 1962 film La Jetée but with nuclear apocalypse replaced by HIV/AIDS." It also claims inspiration from the work of Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden and George Platt Lynes (I would add Pierre et Gilles as well). All of that can be found in the photos and their relationship to each other but "Sun City" is a simple cri de couer narrative. An Indian man is seen alternately in a relationship with an older white man, and then cruising a particularly exotic bathhouse. All of Gupta's obsessions fuse in these photographs with the longing of cruising, of wanting to belong to the dominant culture, of not wanting to belong, fear of political reprisal and fury about its inevitability, are wrapped in sumptuous sensual colour. The message blunt but so finely, so gaily, suffused with eroticism that they are irresistible. Tracing Gupta's journey from portraits of friends to staging the elaborate eloquent tableaus of "Sun City" is an opportunity that no photographer or gay man should miss.
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