A brush with… Sunil Gupta—podcast – The Art Newspaper

Across more than half a century, Sunil Gupta has explored queer identity, migration and race through photography. Born in New Delhi in 1953, but based in Canada and the UK, as well as India since he became an artist, he has reflected on his personal background and autobiography to explore a wealth of social and political themes, from queer desire and relationships, and the social and geographical environments in which LGBTQ life and love happens, to political violence and the oppression of queer people, and the HIV/Aids crisis and its legacy.

Gupta has said that he “couldn’t separate the living from the art-making”. Working in series that often have novel conceptual structures and explore different modes of presentation and expression in the photographic space, Gupta is both an artist and activist, with a long-held conviction to represent his own experience and that of people and communities like him in cultural fields where they have largely been absent.

In this podcast, Gupta reflects on his discovery of photography and his early experiments, the politics around photographic depiction and his alignment with community and political subjects versus a more commercial or reportage approach.

He discusses great photographers including George Platt Lynes, Duane Michals and Paul Strand, expresses his admiration for Shilpa Gupta, his early passion for the tragicomedy of Bollywood and his enjoyment of writers including Flannery O’Connor, and his response to Chris Marker’s La Jétee in his work Sun City. Plus, he gives insight into his life in the studio, as well as answering our usual questions, including the ultimate: what is art for?

The conversation is also available as a video. Visit the YouTube channels of The Art Newspaper and Bloomberg Connects.

• Sunil Gupta: Life with a Camera, 1970-Now, Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge,
19 September-31 January 2027

This podcast is sponsored by Bloomberg Connects, the arts and culture platform. Bloomberg Connects offers access to a vast range of international cultural organisations through a single click, with new guides being added regularly. They include a host of UK museums and galleries that have held solo exhibitions of Sunil Gupta’s work, including Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, the location of Sunil’s show in the autumn of 2026, the Holburne Museum in Bath and the Photographers’ Gallery in London. On the guide to the Photographers’ Gallery, you can explore the exhibition Japanese Women Photographers: From 1950s to Now, which continues at the gallery until 27 September 2026. The show spotlights the work of 27 artists, whose work reflects an extraordinary period in Japanese history, and has helped shape perceptions of it. Videos focus on some of the photobooks in the exhibition, while audio features describe the periods and themes reflected in each of the galleries in the show. Elsewhere on the guide, you can also access the gallery’s vast digital archive, where a search of Sunil Gupta will lead you to a wealth of material on his 2020 exhibition at the gallery, and much more.