Queer Images <http://www.kafila.org/2007/05/19/queer-images/>
Published by Gautam Bhan <http://www.kafila.org/author/gautam-bhan/> May 19th, 2007 in Sex <http://www.kafila.org/category/sex/> , Genders <http://www.kafila.org/category/genders/> and Images <http://www.kafila.org/category/images/> . Tags: art history <http://www.kafila.org/tag/art-history/> , photo <http://www.kafila.org/tag/photo/> , sexuality <http://www.kafila.org/tag/sexuality/> , sunil gupta <http://www.kafila.org/tag/sunil-gupta/> . Sunil Gupta is a renowned photographer whose work over the last three decades has spanned images of the body, migration, exile, HIV and sexuality. He also has a lot to say about the need for an art history centred on sexuality. See his work on www.sunilgupta.net. Also, see his jointly curated exhibit, autoportraits, as part of The Nigah QueerFest '07. Details at www.thequeerfest.com. Sunil's work will come out in a book by Yoda Press in 2008. I had a chance to speak to Sunil recently for an interview that was published in Time Out Delhi. Excerpts: G: Today, Sunil, you are known as a photographer who has a significant body of work on sexuality, and especially on gay and lesbian lives. How did sexuality first enter your work? S: I moved to Canada from Delhi when I was 15. I arrived in September, 1969, literally a month after the Stonewall uprising in New York, so you could feel the effects of gay liberation everywhere. I went to a very liberal junior college. Everyone came out then. So being gay was very cool, unlike being Indian which was not cool at all. There were no Indians around me at the time. I started shooting gay news items for a fledgling campus newsletter. Those were my first photographs on sexuality. We were trying to find positive images in those early days. It was about taking happy picture of people happily being gay to counter all the negative imagery around us. My theoretical investigation into photography began when I finally studied photography formally in London. Suddenly, everything was called into question. How were you related to the subject of your photograph? The transparency, the real-ness, in a sense, of the photograph was called into question. People had become critical of the sugary, positive images - there seemed to be no space to be critical. At this time, also, the mainstream gay media began to take off in England in the mid 1970s. Illustrated local magazines appeared and there was suddenly popular gay reproduction that was all about hunky, naked guys that became the norm and remains the norm today within so much of gay imagery. All our critical thinking has failed to shift this norm. I began to think then that looking at all these endless, mindless hunky boy pictures was not enough. The problem for me was much more of a social nature - about gay life, not sex life. Whenever I say "gay" and "photography" people assume I take pictures of naked boys and of a particular kind of boy and body, and I have to say, "No, its not about that." G: So what is the alternative explanation you gave them? How did you see sexuality that was different? S: There was all these ways in which I was trying to find my bearings. One of them was the intersection of race and sexuality. I realized, as a gay Indian, I was invisible in England. It became a mission for me to place gay Indian men into some art historical framework, to find some references. Many of us gay Indian men at the time would de-Indianise ourselves in order just for people to find us attractive. Then the first groups that brought together gay South Asian men started at this point, in the 1980s. It became again about bringing together positive images for this community, and building this visual archive. Then in the mid-1980s I came back to shoot in India. Not sexuality, but in development. When I talked to the development crowd, who were the most political people I knew, sexuality wasn't on their radar at all. Anyways, I thought I needed to make some pictures of gay Indian men in India, and that's how Exiles came about. I had this great ally - Saleem Kidwai - and he was my access to the community. We used willing participants, and they had to be gay men who said they were gay. It didn't matter to the audience, but it mattered to me. It's a footnote to the work: that these people were there in 1986, they were gay, and they said that they were. They're not actors. It was about what gay life was like then, not the sex life, but the lives these men had to lead back then. (Click here <http://www.sunilgupta.net/Exiles/exiles9.html> to see The Party, 1986) G: Returning to India twenty years later, you're now working on a similar project, taking portraits of queer communities in Delhi. How is it different from 1986? S: There is an enormous shift. In the 80s, no one was out openly as gay, and it reflects in the pictures. The portraits I do now involve naming. The men and women in these photographs look back at you, straight at the camera, and they assume a sense of power. In the 80s, the story sounds sad and victim like. These are people to whom things happen, they have no control. People today seem much more in control of their lives and their sexuality in particularly. And, very significantly, their names appear underneath the pictures. That would have been impossible in the 80s.The naming, other than the obvious identification, are also such a wonderful giveaway about how diverse the community is. In an Indian context, names are so meaningful, in terms of region, religion, and all other identity markers. So naming is also about making that political statement that sexuality isn't about one small class of people. It shows the scale and breadth of this experience. G: Do you think about how people will perceive your work? Is there a way in which you want people to experience your photographs? S: There is a very clear intention in my work. Art history is everything to me. It carries a culture's baggage, and people acquire it even subliminally, and they do it significantly through images, especially in the subcontinent where images are often more powerful than the written word. Every kind of image - cinema, advertising, film, photo. People look for affirmation in these images. Because gay and lesbian images are so missing from our art history, those of us who actually are homosexual don't know where to look. Our history is missing. I want to create a contemporary history for an audience of tomorrow, so they know where to look and how to imagine and see themselves. My work is framed to feed that sense of history and feed it to the culture at large because I think that's the mechanism to normalize same sex desire. Then this way it is also of interest to everybody, so that everyone can internalize the images of gay and lesbian people and recognise them as part of our culture. G: Is there something particular about the portrait as a type of photograph for you, because it occupies such a central place in your work? S: You could argue that since the beginning of representation, the earliest drawings in the world are of people. As a species, we're interested in what we look like. In history, the ruling classes have used portraits to document themselves and their subjects. Until the 20th century, places like the National Portrait Gallery in London was about the ruling family. In Delhi, an exhibition of photographs since independence was half comprised of portraits of our royalty - the Nehru-Gandhi clan. Middle class people have domestic family albums, but working class people has no pictures of themelves. Any kind of marginal group often doesn't have images of themselves. So, in a sense, it is a claim to power. Autoportraits at the Nigah QueerFest is part of that claim. Taking a self portrait is a very interesting exercise, because it forces you to think about yourself. For a group of queer people, many of whom have suffered a damaged sense of self worth, it can almost be therapeutic. For an audience, it presents a collection of pictures that is as close as they are going to get to see a whole range of queer people. Where else will you see this? No one will commission work like this, so Autoportraits <http://www.thequeerfest.com> to me is an important first show to do to establish an art history of queer image in India. _____ gb <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gay_bombay> http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gay_bombay <http://groups.google.com/group/Gaybombay> http://groups.google.com/group/Gaybombay Website: <http://www.gaybombay.in/> www.gaybombay.in Email: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gay_bombay/post?postID=sF-1WE71anBidHS3GY1SYm 5klKs8kORvsCE-7rTALIhT1GR4Nb5d-rGFtKw58iwvfwc16QBg_UkFzxaeQ6q09Q> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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