Fifty Years, Four Cities, One Camera: Sunil Gupta Gets His Fullest Survey Yet
Most photographers who live long enough are eventually reduced to a single series. The retrospective arrives, the famous pictures are hung large, and the rest of the life’s work is left to a vitrine of contact sheets. The survey of Sunil Gupta that opened at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge on Saturday does something harder and more useful. It puts more than 130 works on the wall and asks you to follow one person across fifty years, four cities and several quite different ideas about what a photograph is for.
Sunil Gupta: Life with a Camera, 1970 – Now runs until 31 January 2027 and is the most comprehensive account of his work assembled anywhere. It is also free — pay what you wish, though you will need to book — which for an exhibition of this scale is worth stating plainly.
A life told in series
Gupta was born in New Delhi in 1953 and moved with his family to Montreal as a teenager. The earliest work here, Friends and Lovers, comes out of that period: young people in a Canadian city in the 1970s, photographed by someone who was both inside the scene and newly arrived in it. Then comes Christopher Street, made in New York in 1976, seven years after Stonewall, when Gupta was studying under Lisette Model at the New School. Those pictures are the ones most likely to be familiar. They are street photographs in the classical sense — quick, unposed, taken on a pavement — but the subject is men walking through the West Village with a confidence that had not existed in public a decade earlier. Gupta has said he was simply photographing his own world. The historical weight arrived later.
From there the exhibition follows him back east and west again. Exiles, made in Delhi in 1986 and 1987, photographs gay men in the city’s public spaces at a time when their lives were criminalised and largely undocumented; the images are staged with a deliberate stillness, their subjects often turned away. Black Experience, from the same year, belongs to his London life and to the British Black arts conversation of the mid-1980s. Mr Malhotra’s Party, begun in 2007, is a set of frank colour portraits of queer Delhi made across the years when India’s anti-sodomy law was being fought over in the courts — decriminalised in 2009, reinstated in 2013, finally struck down in 2018. Dissent and Desire, made with his long-term collaborator Charan Singh in 2015, sits in the middle of that argument.
Why the breadth matters
Laid out together, the run of series makes a point that individual shows have tended to obscure. Gupta is not a documentary photographer who occasionally makes art, nor an art photographer who occasionally documents. He moves between modes depending on what the moment can bear: candid when the street is safe, constructed when it is not, tender when the subject is a friend or a partner. The curatorial argument at Kettle’s Yard, led by its director Andrew Nairne, is that this flexibility is the achievement rather than an inconsistency.
There is a second point buried in the chronology. Gupta spent much of his career as an organiser as well as an artist — co-founding Autograph ABP, running exhibitions and publishing projects, building the infrastructure that let other photographers of colour be seen in Britain at all. A survey that covers five decades inevitably documents the institutional history alongside the pictures.
The right building
Kettle’s Yard is an odd and rather wonderful place to see this. The house itself is Jim Ede’s: a domestic interior of Gaudier-Brzeska sculptures, Ben Nicholson reliefs and Alfred Wallis paintings, arranged with pebbles and light and a famously strict sense of where things should sit. The galleries next door, added in the Jamie Fobert redevelopment that reopened in 2018, are a straightforwardly contemporary exhibition space. The proximity does something to both. Ede’s house is a monument to a very particular mid-century English idea of quiet good taste; Gupta’s work is about who gets to be visible in public. Seeing them within a few minutes of each other is not a contradiction so much as a useful jolt.
For anyone within reach of Cambridge, the exhibition is a straightforward recommendation, and the four-month run means there is no need to rush. A 170-photograph publication accompanies it, with new essays and introductions by Gupta himself, and the events programme includes conversations with the photographer Hal Fischer in November and with Charan Singh in January.
What lingers, though, is smaller than any of that. Among the crowd scenes and the political series are a great many pictures of people Gupta simply loved — family, friends, partners, photographed over decades. The activism in his work has never been separable from the affection. That is the argument the show makes best, and it makes it without raising its voice.
Sunil Gupta: Life with a Camera, 1970 – Now is at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, until 31 January 2027. Entry is free; booking required.