Sunil Gupta: London 82
In the early 1980s, Sunil Gupta enrolled at the Royal College of Art in London, where he had access to color-negative processing facilities. He took to the streets of the capital in search of the centers gay London life around Earl’s Court, King’s Road, and the West End.
“I hoped to repeat my experience of Christopher Street in New York, except now in London and in color. It wasn’t to be. Even what appeared to be a concentration of gay life was not dense enough to create its own public space, so I was getting either huge gaps between people or a crowd of very mixed people. I decided to abandon an exclusively gay subject and started concentrating on whatever caught my eye—migrants, people of color, gay men, elderly people out and about on their own.” — Sunil Gupta
This series recently resurfaced through Gupta’s process of archiving his past images, providing a catalog of the Sloanes, New Romantic, and pensioners who once roamed London’s streets.
About the Author
Sunil Gupta (born 1953)is an Indian-born Canadian photographer, based in London. His career has been spent “making work responding to the injustices suffered by gay men across the globe, himself included”, including themes of sexual identity, migration, race, and family.
Gupta has produced a number of books and his work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Tate. In 2020 he was awarded an Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society. He currently has a solo exhibition at The Photographers’ Gallery in London.
