Photographer Sunil Gupta on how the camera shaped his identity as a gay man in the 1970s

Veteran photographer Sunil Gupta looks back at how the camera shaped his life, outlook and identity as a gay man in the 1970s

What does it mean to be a gay Indian man? At 69, photographer, artist and activist Sunil Gupta, still hasn’t found an answer. “Or, it changes all the time,” he says.

When Sunil left Delhi with his family to migrate to Canada at the age of 15, his Indian past inched towards obscurity. It was the gay liberation movement of 1970s Montreal, and his discovery of the term ‘gay’ that pulled him closer to his identity. The camera played catalyst to this journey of self-discovery.

Documenting the movement, by shadowing marches on streets, camera in hand, he paved way to his own sexual awakening. Today, after decades of asking questions, learning, unlearning and silently evolving with his camera, while living with HIV, Sunil boasts an important body of work that reflects life as it is, and should be. He was recently in Chennai for a discussion titled Sunil Gupta: Practising for a Life, in collaboration with Chennai Photo Biennale and the British Council of India.   

Sunil first picked up an old analogue German camera in the 1950s. To capture his childhood friend’s sisters, who happily posed as models, as they would for a magazine shoot. Soon after, he left suddenly to Canada. In those times, cinema was both a respite and education for him.  

But enamored by the independence it gives, he returned to the camera. “I bought a film camera as a student, and started to shoot.. mainly the family. Then I got involved with the gay liberation movement in my university and made a tabloid for which started teaching myself photography. Not very good photographs…I was just trying to document what was happening,” he says.

His collection titled Friends & Lovers: Coming Out in Montreal in the 1970s is a welcome collage of happy memories — of a carefree life painted with new-found hope, and liberation. A black-and-white frame shows three friends in the streets of Montreal, in the precipice of breaking out into a dance, happy to have found their tribe. 

Another important moment in his personal history lies in New York where he documented a thriving “gay public space as hadn’t really been seen before”. He had originally gone to enroll in an MBA programme, but ended up learning photography with Lisette Model, who Sunil calls his mentor, in The New School, New York. “She pushed me towards photography and I took her word for it.” It was the days before the AIDS epidemic when everyone was young, busy and thriving, he remembers. Christopher Street, New York 1976, was a series that came out of the weekends spent “cruising with a camera”. It captures the city, its streets and people, characterized by infectious, youthful energy.