"What does it mean to be a gay Indian man? This is the question that follows me around everywhere I go and is still ever present in my work" - Sunil Gupta
Joint winner of the 2021 Kraszna-Krausz Photography Book Award
From Here to Eternity traces Sunil Gupta’s life through his personal archive: the snapshots, postcards, letters, posters, and news clippings collected during his long career in photography and activism. These fragments of ephemera are annotated with Gupta’s handwritten notes, mapping a four-decade-long journey investigating the question what does it mean to be a gay Indian man?
Moments from protests, the black arts movement in Britain, the fight for representation in photography and beyond, and Gupta’s work around queer visibility in India are shared – alongside mementoes from friends, family and relationships. What emerges is a powerful, and deeply personal, record of the artist’s struggles, victories, and a life lived through the complex politics of social change.
Published to accompany the major exhibition From Here to Eternity: Sunil Gupta. A Retrospective at The Photographers’ Gallery, London 9 Oct 2020 – 24 Jan 2021; and touring to Ryerson Image Centre Gallery, Toronto autumn 2021.
About the artist
Born 1953 in New Delhi, India, Sunil Gupta relocated to Montreal, Canada, before studying at the Royal College of Art in London. He has been using photography as a critical practice since the 1970s, focusing on race, migration, and queer issues. Gupta’s work has been widely exhibited, and can be found in many private and public collections, including the George Eastman Museum (Rochester, USA), the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography (Japan), the Royal Ontario Museum (Toronto, Canada), the Tate (London, England), and the Museum of Modern Art (New York, USA).
He received his PhD from the University of Westminster, UK, and is a Visiting Tutor at the Royal College of Art.