1:1 with Sunil Gupta

1. What is your earliest memory of how or what attracted you to photography?

The only photography that I was aware of while growing up was what you had in the family album. And my earliest memory is not of photography but is of cinema. My bedtime stories tended to be of movies that my mother had seen that week and then, when I was old enough, they would take me to the cinema. So that became my main source of entertainment and screen culture in the 50s was only cinema, with of course no Internet and no television, all you could do was go to the cinema.

Our family album was populated by photos taken by my dad. He used one of those cameras that took square little negatives, called 127. When I went to secondary school, I got involved more directly with photography. My best friend then and I were both interested in photography and decided to do something about it. We had our parents’ cameras and somehow we figured out a basic darkroom in his barsati. It was a small world. I grew up in East Nizamuddin, we lived right at the end of B-block, the last lane where the market is, and I would take a school bus to Saint Columba’s every day and my best friend lived in west Kidwai Nagar. After school, I’d either go to him or he’d come to me. So that was kind of my triangulated world. All I knew was from my house to school to his house. And both of us had slightly older sisters. So, when we were both around twelve, they were about 15 or 16 and they were looking at teenage magazines and some magazines coming from outside. That’s where I really got to see photographs, in these magazines. There was the Illustrated Weekly and there was also this Soviet Magazine, which was free, and there were these American ones, which were quite costly. We also used our sisters as models to pose for us to make very local, colony version glamorous pictures of them dressed up in the local parks and then retire to the barsati to process the films. I don’t know how we managed to do it. It was very hard, as we had no control over anything. The odd thing is they came out surprisingly. We had some rudimentary, rough-looking negatives. We even had an enlarger as I have some prints that we had made then. I think by the end of it we were overwhelmed by the technology and the weather. It was just impossible. Half the time we couldn’t be in the barsati because it was too hot and humid.

Then we left for Canada when I was fifteen. And the family album, in a sense, became intrinsic as it represented life before we had left. It became like a memorial to something very historic, after a plane journey. You see it was a one-way ticket. We weren’t well off and I could not afford to come back for years, so India became represented by the family album. It seemed really, really far away. It was costly to travel and communication those days was through aerograms, which was the best one could do. And the place where I had come had no interest in from where I had come. I realized that my high school in Canada had zero knowledge and zero interest in where I had come from. There was nothing to discuss and, for me, it was like starting again from scratch with no baggage at all at the age of fifteen, and that was weird!

2. When did you first start taking pictures and what were you photographing those days?

My interest in films continued in Canada and it became more collegiate. In college, we had this very good film society, which was showing great art cinema from Japan and India and other places. It was like getting a cheap and informal education in cinema. And there was nothing related to photography that was happening in a serious way. It was in college when I found another buddy and both of us would go and watch movies together. And we decided that, though we couldn’t make a movie, we could try and make one using stills. My friend was a student of Russian literature and was interested in writing, and I bought a basic camera. Being in Canada, suddenly things were more affordable. I could go into a shop and buy a 150-dollar camera that I couldn’t do in Delhi. I got myself a basic Pentax camera with a manual lens and bought a bunch of Time and LIFE photo books that were kind of teaching manuals. So, I taught myself from these books and began to shoot just as a hobby. And occasionally with my friend, we’d try something more serious. He would write a script and we would shoot accordingly. And we would make these little strips – a series of prints with text running across the bottom, connecting it like a story with a narrative, just for ourselves. There was no place to show this and we did it just for fun.

Soon I got involved with the university’s gay liberation – some student society started in ’71 or ’72 just after Stonewall. We began to publish a newsletter and I volunteered to make photographs for it. And this gave me an outlet in public for my pictures. So, I would go out and shoot various things that were relevant to gay stuff so there would be demonstrations, and there were so many groups that had sprung up, like special interest groups and I would go and document them. Then there was the news and everything was run by the mafia then, all the bars and the places one visited. There was this gay bathhouse that was burnt down, it had people in it and that became very newsworthy, so I photographed that. All of this appeared in the newsletter and I had a credit, so my first photo credit print was that. And I was only 17.

This really cemented my interest and a kind of practice in documenting the politics that was emerging at the time. That’s why I did it. There was not much of a wider culture – nobody was teaching photography, nobody was showing photography. It also kind of made it easier for me as there was no competition, no one else wanted to do it, so I was making those pictures.

I then met someone in college and we moved to New York: him to work and I to do my MBA. And that changed everything as in New York I found a completely different world, which I had no idea existed. It was quite amazing, it was the mid-70s and New York already had upwards of fifty photo galleries, all the museums were showing photography. History of photography could be seen at the MOMA or at the MET, which was permanently on display, or at least some version of it. It completely took me aback. I had no idea it was such a big deal. There were photography courses and there were photography auctions. That’s when I made my big decision to drop out of my MBA and I took some courses at the New School, after which the two of us moved to England.

3. You are self-taught as a photographer, in the sense that you were making images long before you did your M.A in Photography. How did you inform yourself of the medium – the techniques, the language and the aesthetics of it?

I was primarily trying to learn about technique and gain control of the process – the camera and the printing. I was focused on learning these two aspects properly and I did that via books. The kind of pictures that I was seeing were very narrative oriented, it came from my interest in cinema. And I think a lot of my visual sensibilities come from cinema in a way, where the drama unfolds over many frames. I never had this natural photographic ‘decisive moment’ ability to pack everything into one frame. I thought I’d take five frames and tell the story through those five frames rather than pack all that information into one frame. I was never a decisive moment sort of person. What I didn’t get was any feedback on the work that I was making. So, I didn’t know if I was any good or not then.

While in New York I was initially by myself and then spent this lengthy time at photo school where everything was just fed to me. So it helped when I started going to the workshops in New York. Being in a class meant that every week you would make work and bring it to the class and that would get critiqued. This was new to me. You had other people comment on the work you made and say whether they liked it or not and, in those days, people were freely speaking their minds as everything was less commercial, as opposed to today. The teacher would say, “Oh darling, this is shit, go try and make this again.” You can’t say that today. And the teachers also showed great enthusiasm. I was very lucky I had Lisette Model as one of my teachers, who was very enthusiastic about what I did, so that was very encouraging. The classes provided a lot of information quite systematically and I learnt a lot quite quickly, which otherwise would have taken a lot of time. Going to school meant getting more knowledge more quickly. My MA further trained me how to develop my initial thoughts into some kind of an informed sustained practice.

4. Please describe your experience of doing an M.A. in Photography from Royal College of Art, London, and how this education informed your practice.

I had the privilege of attending a two-year MA at the time when there were only six students per year. It meant that my cohort was very important as a support network, since everyone was supposed to come up with their own projects and the college basically provided the space, the darkrooms, the studios, and a technical support staff. Then we were able to invite all kinds of external speakers to come and talk to us. Face-to-face teaching involved fairly brutal crits every six weeks, where the class would assemble and put up their work for review. I think this experience taught me to be self-sufficient in my photography outlook. I also gained invaluable experiences and knowledge by meeting people and having access to places that would not have been possible otherwise. Or might have taken a decade to accomplish something similar.

5. Do you think it is important to receive formal training in photography?

Yes, I do think that it is important to receive formal training in photography these days. You can learn a lot in a shorter period of time. You learn how to organize your own learning processes, and you learn the importance of research. It’s also essential to be able to articulate what you want to do as project proposals and also, once the work is done, it’s essential to be able to talk about it using some form of contemporary discourse. These are things that you learn at college.

6. If you were to design a photo program for young Indian photographers, what would it look like? Would it be a degree course? Workshop format? Mentorships?

This is a large question. I think you probably need all three. Ideally, I’d like to see more degree courses in India; currently, there are too few given the size of the population. There is already an old tradition of mentors. And there are all kinds of workshops nowadays of varying sizes and varying interests. But for students to acquire the level of knowledge and a skill set that will enable them to identify what it is that they want to make their work about, and then how to go about making it, ideally needs a college degree-level program. What is changing at the moment is how these programs are being delivered – especially in the light of the COVID-19 situation. I am more directly involved with postgraduate photography education, so for me it’s usual that a student comes with at least one major project to undertake that I can guide and generate group discussions around in the classroom. I’m involved in several kinds of postgraduate teaching. One is an MFA program, which is more studio driven and is two years long, the other is an MA program which is shorter, just over one year. Here I give a theory lecture once a week for a semester, as these students have to write an essay to show that they have been able to acquire some research skills and knowledge that they can use to articulate ideas of their own. In the UK, we also have PhD degrees by practice, and I’m involved in the supervision of one, which involves intense one-to-one tutoring.

7. You have expressed your sexual identity visually through photography and in the process, created work that is not only autobiographical but is, at the same time, a comment on the politics of sexuality and representation. Please discuss this and share your struggles – personal and societal – while creating this work.

My interest in photography emerged from making family photos when I was at university and I encountered the birth of gay liberation there. Joining that student society was a big turning point for my photography, as it provided me with both subject matter and an audience for my work. It also made me aware of gay politics and the need to document them both for current consumption but also as a future historical archive. However, I was a business student – not in the humanities. Therefore, my photography interests were extracurricular. When I came to formal photography education and subsequently began to work for a living, this interest shaped both my life and the sexual politics around it – as representation through photography became a primary focus. I did not get involved with the art marketplace, so it didn’t bother me that nobody was maybe buying the pictures. I earned my living doing editorial photography for the commercial market and a bit of teaching. I suppose that by not focusing on commercial success in the early part of my career, it did mean that there were difficult financial times in between. Luckily, in those days it was possible to survive in London on very little, given that we have state help with housing and healthcare. I doubt if such a plan would have worked in the U.S. or in India without some kind of family money behind you.

8. From being a gay activist and a photographer, how did you get into doing shows and curating?

Having done my MA from the fancy Royal College of Art, I grew tired of waiting for curators to turn up at my door to offer me shows. Therefore, I took up curating as a way of putting my own work into exhibitions that I had created. With my business studies background (and it’s possibly in my genes), it seemed natural to me to get involved with what is basically arts management. The activism of photography naturally evolved into an activism of curating. I saw a big gap but there was a huge lack of showing work by practitioners of African and Asian descent, so it became my politically motivated desire to fill that gap. To do this I was lucky to get an Arts Council grant to start up a curatorial company called OVA.

9. You have been an artist, photographer, curator, educator, and activist. Which role do you enjoy the most?

I enjoy all of these roles equally. Over the years I’ve come to define myself as a practitioner whose practice covers all of these areas. It wasn’t enough just to do one or two of them given the kind of cultural politics that I live in, it seems inevitable that one has to get involved with all these roles. Mainly, I am aware that I have been incredibly fortunate to be able to choose to do the things that I do.

10. Please describe one show that you especially enjoyed curating.

There have been several, but in relation to India I would say the exhibition that I worked on in collaboration with Radhika Singh and the Vadehra Art Gallery called Click comes to mind. I had recently moved back to live in Delhi, and I was interested to know more about the photography scene locally and nationally. Meanwhile, in the background I also had a research job at the Whitechapel Gallery, in London, to look at Indian photography. It was hard to know where to start, since there was little primary research available in the form of publishing. Conversations with Radhika Singh led to us approaching the gallery with the idea of a contemporary Indian photography show.

Fortunately, the gallery was very positive about the idea, even though showing editioned prints in a commercial gallery still seemed like a relatively new thing in India. There was also no precedent for funding the research, so a formula was made up by which Radhika’s company was able to host the research and everybody was relying on some picture sales at the end. Research funding in photography can be a problem in India as there are no obvious bodies to fund it. Most galleries rely on artist-photographers coming to them with completed bodies of work. We decided to contact as many individual photographers as we could around the country, and our budget allowed us to make field visits to the main metros. There, a gallery would host us and we would invite photographers to come and show us their portfolios. I think by the end of this process we had looked at over 650 peoples’ work. Some had been sent to us and some we met in person. It was a great eye opener to see the kind of work people were making at that time. Although there were several issues along the way, not everyone understood what showing a portfolio meant, and so on. In the end, it was hard to decide what to show, as there was an abundance of choice. We decided, as the curators, to maximize the number of participants by only showing two or three images from each contributor. The most enjoyable part was the installation, I have realized that this is often the case. It’s like the last bit of the puzzle, trying to figure out what work goes together and what work actually makes sense in a frame on the wall. The opening was an incredible party and absolutely packed, I had never seen so many Indian photographers in one room and I don’t think I’ve seen anything like it since.

11. What draws / drew you to the subject matter you are pursuing in your current work?

My current work arrived as an opportunity. I was offered a residency in a major London hospital trust. It was up to me to figure out what I wanted to do, and I came up with a plan to further my understanding around gender and sexuality – two of the issues that have been with me for a long time. Through my academic research, I’m aware that these are not categories that stand still. That, as a cis-gendered gay male, I had new things to learn. So, I chose two specific clinical areas of work – the oldest HIV OPD in a London hospital, and the ward that conducts gender reassignment surgery for the NHS. Then the Coronavirus came, and now everything to do with hospitals is on hold!

12. Who or what has inspired you to pursue photography and/or continues to do so?

I grew up in Delhi with Bollywood cinema in the 1960s, so I’m compelled by and drawn towards big, colorful, narrative imagery. Photography became the way that I can express myself through a lens. I was and continue to be very inspired by how the real world looks in a photographic image, so I’m drawn to shoot all kinds of random subject matter, just to see what it looks like as a photo. I suppose you can say I’m a shooter. I’ve probably taken far too many pictures over the years and there’s no sign of this stopping anytime soon. Just like a compulsion, and everything else seems secondary.

13. Is there a book, exhibition, or body of work that has really impressed you and maybe influenced your work / life?

There have been many over the years. I’ll try and list the most significant ones chronologically. I taught myself photography by the Time & Life series on photography that appeared at the end of the 60s. Technically, I was drawn to Ansel Adams and his Zone system and I taught myself how to use that. As a young gay man, I was looking for gay inspiration and I found Duane Michals and Arthur Tress. When I came to New York in the 70s, I studied with Lisette Model and Philipe Halsman, both of whom I admired very much. Lisette talked often about one of her more famous pupils, Diane Arbus, whose work I came to admire. That extended to the exhibition that included her work, called “New Documents,” that was at MoMA, and included work by Lee Friedlander and Gary Winogrand, as well. It made vernacular photography, and especially street photography, legitimate subjects for modern art. And I wanted to do street photography. It’s something I still do. Then, in the ’80s there was Robert Mapplethorpe, whose influence you couldn’t deny whether you liked it or not, and there was the influence of Nan Golden, and of course the feminist works of people like Cindy Sherman. I suppose I was imbued with the modernist tradition of photography that stretched westward from Russia and Germany to New York that included that well-known cast of photographers. I had to train myself to look beyond this and I found people like Zanelli Muholi, who we brought to Delhi in one of our Nigah Queer Fests at Max Mueller Bhavan, back in 2009.

14. Do your projects typically run in parallel, or do you focus on one project at a time?

Projects sometimes run parallel, as it’s not always feasible to do them one at a time, especially if they are stretched across time and geographies. Sometimes I have 2 or 3 going at once. Others are limited by circumstances; Sun City had to be made completely in one month in Paris and there was no more budget to extend the time. Mr. Malhotra’s Party has been going on for many years, whenever I am in Delhi and someone is willing to be in a picture, I go and make another picture. There are nearly fifty portraits now. But I hadn’t started out thinking that this has to be done in a year or two, or that I need 20 pictures or anything like that. It’s acquired its own organic life.

15. Do you ever find yourself creatively ‘stuck?’ Is there something that is particularly helpful to you in overcoming this?

Yes, like all of us I do find myself ‘stuck’ sometimes. I’ve had different responses to this situation. The techie photographer in me will want to buy a camera with a different frame format. Suddenly, the world looks different and inspiration returns. Other times I’ve turned to reading fiction. It’s something I rarely have an opportunity to do, so it’s a welcome break. Sometimes the reading will lead to a new idea. I’ve always been drawn to narratives so watching films and reading novels can trigger thoughts that make an immediate creative impact but sometimes get stored away and only reappear years later. I also read the newspapers to see what kinds of amazing and bizarre things are happening today, and sometimes there will be a creative trigger in that. I also go and see art shows and photography shows and some of that can help, but it’s not something that first springs to mind if I’m feeling stuck. I find work in those circumstances can look already too resolved.

16. How much effort do you put into getting your work shown? Is this important to you? Does showing your work feed your creative process, or does it distract you from it?

I put a lot of effort into getting my work shown. It’s primarily why I make it. I’ve spent most of my life since my undergraduate years being part of networks – either activist networks or reading groups or social networks that are highly charged by debates around politics and culture. I often use friends from these networks in my work and I want to share my work for some kind of validation from them, from my own communities. Sometimes, whether work is about sensitive social topics like homosexuality or AIDS, it’s imperative that this be shown and enter public discourse. Finally, I am hugely motivated to tell my story and have it absorbed into the cultural mainstream as art history. This is actually a hugely motivating factor in my creative process.

17. Digital technology has changed photography drastically over the last few years. Did you initially embrace the changes or resist them? Do you believe the changes have been good for the medium or not?

I was an early adopter of the new digital technology. When we were setting up Autograph in London, I used to really struggle to make newsletters with pictures on a very basic computer with a very low-resolution screen. I was so thrilled when the first Apple computers came out, and they looked so cute. I bought the first Apple scanner that came out and immediately began to scan everything. It gave me a sense of incredible freedom being liberated from the analog camera process to get to an image. I made an ambitious body of work called Trespass in three different parts. I used a very basic analog camera and gave the color negative rolls to a chemist to process and got back the usual prints. These were scanned in my scanner along with all kinds of other printed matter, like postcards, book covers, newspaper clippings, anything that seemed relevant to me. I collaged this together on my little Apple computer and I took the files down to a print shop in town. Here they made me ten-foot-long prints. I thought they looked fabulous, even though everything was low res about them. I think the change has been good for photography, it’s affecting the definition of photography as it now occurs in an even more universal manner, the mobile phone has made it accessible to the masses in a way that was unimaginable. It has also tied still photography to the moving image in a much more obvious and meaningful way that had been the case in the analog world. Even though 35 mm film for the still camera had been born as a motion picture film size.

18. Do you think there is a universal language that photography uses? Do you think that Indian photographers are finding that they are judged by western criteria and standards?

I think the technology that governs photography is universal. So, the physics and chemistry of making a photo are the same wherever you are. But obviously cultural references, and the baggage people bring, both to making the image and viewing it, are different from place to place and may even vary from locality to locality or city to city, depending on where you are. There is a globalizing that is happening that seems to be irresistible – obviously through the Internet, but also through photography festivals and art biennales and such. Photography education is also spreading a western canon, which was established in the 20th century, and this is now being challenged. Interesting debates are happening in the creation and delivery of photography curricula across the globe. I teach in London where over 50 percent of my classes are constituted by Asian students, some of whom I presume will go home and teach also. Therefore, I think this idea that there are varying standards that can be described as western and non-western is a bit of a red herring. Many of the leading Indian photo art practitioners received their educations in American schools, so whose standards are we judging them by? In the ’70s and ’80s, when I was a student, it used to be that particular schools stood for particular “schools of thought.” But now I see a globally harmonious curriculum being rolled out wherever you enroll as a student. With online delivery becoming the norm, especially now with the COVID virus, you don’t even have to leave your home to access a global photography education and the standards that come with that.

19. With your years of experience, of the lessons you have learned, what is the one thing you wish someone had told you when you were starting out?

I wish somebody had underlined to me the need to have another money-making skill on the side, as obviously what I wanted to do (and what I did) was not going to make me any money. And sometimes the lack of money meant I couldn’t make any work at all.

20. How would an interested collector go about buying your work?

From one of my galleries, depending upon where you were. They are: Hales Gallery (London and New York), Steven Bulger Gallery (Toronto), and the Vadehra Art Gallery (New Delhi). Sometimes I make a special edition off a single image that I sell for much less in order to raise funds for some specific purpose, like paying the printing costs of the next photo book. I advertise through my website and by writing directly to people.

21. If you didn’t do photography, what other career might you have pursued?

When I was a child, growing up opposite the Nizamuddin railway station, my ambition was to be a railway engine driver, driving one of those trains. Actually, my first degree was in accounting and I’m an MBA dropout, so I guess I’ve had a narrow escape from becoming yet another desi financial consultant on Wall Street.

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