Do You Have Place? A Conversation with Sunil Gupta

Sunil Gupta’s practice as a photographer has spanned generations, continents, and cities. Throughout, he has grappled with the question ‘what does it mean to be an Indian queer man?’ Gupta’s approach to photography reveals a perspective embedded in the postcolonial sites of Montreal and Delhi, and shaped by his artistic education in London. The use of staged documentary – which reveals Gupta’s role as a key player in British photo theory – has worked to bring feeling and experience into representation, creating a photographic basis for identification as gay and/or queer Indian. Based on a conversation at the 2019 conference ‘Cruising the Seventies: Imagining Queer Europe then and now’, this article draws from Gupta’s testimony to map the ways in which his photographs answer to his question. It proposes that Gupta’s work challenges a Eurocentric visual vocabulary, and can offer tools for imagining how ‘queer Europe’ might be displaced and refigured.