When the photographer Sunil Gupta exhibited his Exiles series—depicting the hidden lives of gay men in Delhi—in a group show at the Photographers' Gallery in 1987, the works “sank without a trace”, he says. “Too foreign, too ethnic. It was unintelligible. People didn’t know what to do with it.”
Twenty-three years later, in the same London venue, the series is once again on show for From Here to Eternity, Gupta’s first major career survey, which uses 16 distinct bodies of work to chart his five-decade-long career and tell the probing, personal narrative of a gay Indian immigrant in the West.
“I seem to be having a moment,” says Gupta, who recently featured in the Barbican’s Masculinities group show and will receive a retrospective at Toronto’s Ryerson Image Centre in 2021. In the past two years Tate and the Museum of Modern Art in New York have both acquired works from Exiles.
