We Were Here: Sexuality, Photography, and Cultural Difference offers an unparalleled firsthand account of the influential photographer and curator Sunil Gupta’s writing and critical inquiry since the 1970s. Newspaper articles, speeches, and essays show Gupta’s crucial role at the center of grassroots queer and postcolonial organizing throughout an artistic career lived between Canada, the UK, and India. In his pieces about homosexuality in Indian cities, the AIDS crisis, the Black Arts Movement, or key figures including Joy Gregory and Robert Mapplethorpe, Gupta foregrounds the power of cultural activism in the politically fraught contexts of London and Delhi, and illuminates the essential connections between queer migration and self-discovery. Continually questioning given forms of identity, Gupta offers artists and curators multiple strategies of resistance, carving out space for new ways of imagining what it might mean to live, love, and create.
This event is presented in partnership with The Common Press.
Sunil Gupta, Outtake from the series Exiles, Delhi, 1986; from We Were Here: Sexuality, Photography, and Cultural Difference (Aperture, 2022). Courtesy the artist and Hales Gallery, London; Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto; and Vadehra Art Gallery, Delhi.
Sunil Gupta (born in New Delhi, 1953) is a photographer, curator, writer, and activist. Gupta migrated to Canada at the age of fifteen. He was educated in photography at the New School, New York and the Royal College of Art, London. Over a career spanning more than four decades, Gupta has maintained a visionary approach to photography, producing bodies of work that are pioneering in their social and political commentary. The artist’s diasporic experience of multiple cultures informs a practice dedicated to themes of race, migration, and queer identity—his own lived experience a point of departure for photographic projects, born from a desire to see himself and others like him represented in art history. Gupta’s work has been exhibited internationally and published in numerous monographs and catalogues, including Christopher Street, 1976 (2018) and From Here to Eternity (2020).
Chris Boot is a British photography curator and book publisher, and has worked in a variety of other roles related to photography. He was executive director of Aperture from 2011 to 2021.