Gay portraits
Sunil Gupta shot the portraits that make up Lovers: 10 Years On in the mid-1980s, just as the AIDs crisis was peaking in the UK. Comprised of around thirty photographs, the series was only presented once in public, as part of a group exhibition in 1984—until it was acquired by the Tate in 2018 and exhibited at Tate Modern the tracking year. Now it appears again, as part of Gupta’s retrospective exhibition From Here to Eternity at The Photographer’s Gallery. Gupta struggled to exhibit the series in the intervening years: “For some reason, curators found it oppressive,” he reflects.
Gupta had arrived in London from Modern York in 1978, accompanying his partner at the time. In New York, his first encounters with gay culture and awareness coincided with his finding of photography; he was a student of Lisette Model and had taken photographs on the streets of the West Village that have since change into important documents of the LGBT movement in the years that followed the Stonewall Riots.
Lovers: 10 Years On is now preserved for the public as a photo book, published by Stanley Barker.
online pharmacy buy lipitor no prescription pharmacy
It brings together the comp
Keep up with our community!
Join thousands of others receiving Queer news in their inbox each week.
Sunil Gupta’s Pioneering Portraits of Arrogant Gay Couples
Art & PhotographyIn Pictures
Sunil Gupta tells the story behind his photographs of gay and lesbian couples, taken in 1980s London – a series recently republished by Stanley/Barker in the book Lovers: Ten Years On
TextMiss Rosen
In summer 1978, New Delhi-born, Montreal-raised photographer Sunil Gupta arrived in London. “I was tracking a guy,” Gupta tells AnOther from his home in south London. The two had first met in Canada while enrolled in business school. After graduating, Gupta’s boyfriend took a occupation that required him train in New York City before sending him to London to work.
Just entering his twenties, Gupta went along for the ride, thinking he would get a career when he arrived. Things didn’t quite work out as he had planned. “We started out at a similar footing as students but working at the bank he got settled rapidly and became relatively well off,” Gupta says. “I had gone the other way. I made no money at all and had become completely dependant. It didn’t seem to matter. We were together and in the gay world, ten years seemed like a long time especially back then.”
After Gupta received him
Newly Published Portraits Document a Century of Gay Men in Love
“Loving” features around 300 photos that offer an intimate look at men’s love between the 1850s and 1950s
When Texas couple Hugh Nini and Neal Treadwell stumbled onto a 1920s-era photograph in a Dallas antiques shop some 20 years ago, they were startled to see a relationship that looked much like theirs: two men, embracing and clearly in love.
As Dee Swann writes for the Washington Post, the image spoke to the couple about the history of love between men.
“The open expression of the love that they shared also revealed a moment of determination,” Nini and Treadwell say the Post. “Taking such a photo, during a period when they would have been less understood than they would be today, was not without risk. We were intrigued that a photo like this could have survived into the [21st] century. Who were they?”
In the decades that followed this initial discovery, the pair came across more than 2,800 photos of men in love—at first accidentally and later on purpose. The result of their trips to flea markets, shops, estate sales and family archives across Europe, Canada and the United States is a t