Untitled #02

Location

Country: UK
City: London
Place: Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport, 100 Parliament Street

This work is part of 'London', a 1982 series of 60 street scenes photographed during Sunil Gupta’s MA studies at the Royal College of Art. The photographs were taken near his Fulham home and in the West End around London’s commercial galleries. Gupta was alert to the difficulty of navigating Britain as an openly gay Asian man in the 1980s, in contrast to his first foray into street photography as a student in New York, which he recalled as free and open. Gupta’s London scenes are acutely observant, often poetic, evocations of class, age and race in urban multicultural London.

Born in India in 1953, Sunil Gupta emigrated with his family to Canada where, as a teenager, he discovered his homosexuality and became increasingly drawn to photography. In 1976–77 he lived in New York, abandoning business studies to photograph street life and gay culture. From 1977–80 he studied photography at Farnham University for the Creative Arts, Surrey; completed an MA in photography at the Royal College of Art in 1983; and was awarded a PhD from the University of Westminster in 2018. An artist, filmmaker, curator and writer whose practice is committed to advocating for queer identity and freedom, Gupta has exhibited in the UK and internationally for over four decades. His retrospective, Sunil Gupta: From Here to Eternity is currently at The Photographers' Gallery, London, touring to the Ryerson Image Centre, Toronto in 2021.

Places

London

Subjects

walking, People, man, woman, street

Materials & Techniques

digital photographic print, digital print, inkjet print

Artist

Sunil Gupta (1953 - )

Title

Untitled #02

Series Title

London 1982

Edition

Number 1 in an edition of 5, plus 2 artist's proofs

Date

1982

Medium

digital print

Dimensions

height: 71.1 cm; width: 106.7 cm

Acquisition

Purchased from the artist March 2021, through the Art XUK project 2020-21

Inscription

recto: signed by the artist 'Untitled #02, London 1982 / Sunil Gupta - 1/5 - print 2020'

Provenance

Hales Gallery; from whom purchased by UK Government Art Collection, 18 March 2021

GAC number

18905