Contemporary Culture

HOME TOUR: Sunil Gupta

Rebecca Thomas visits Sunil Gupta’s top-floor apartment in South London.

photography rebecca thomas source index issue nº02; buy it here now

Take in a virtual viewing of Sunil Gupta’s retrospective exhibition, From Here to Eternity, online at galleriesnow.net and then pick up the latest copy of INDEX. Inside is an interview with Gupta talking on his Exiles and Christopher St series, gay liberation, Helmut Lang and more.

“I first came from India when I was 15 and went to high school, people used to say to me ‘why are you wearing those very colourful clothes?’ I’d come from India wearing reds and greens, looking like a Christmas tree. I learnt very fast to switch into a white t-shirt and 501s and sneakers.”

“I realised you can’t be doing the gay stuff for a living, that I would do the rights thing for a living, so I got into documenting social justice and I was looking a lot at the 50s, at Eugene Smith.”

“Mobile phones changed everything. Looking at India, I realised they missed gay liberation, then they missed the laptop, the computer, then when the mobile came… it’s amazing how everybody seems to have one, even the people you might think are quite lowly in the economic scale, have one.”

sunilgupta.net

“Even me, who was almost professionally gay, when I’d go to India people would say if we went to somebody’s house, ‘please don’t mention it’. It wasn’t a good thing to bring up.”