Becoming Visible

WANDERING THROUGH SUNIL GUPTA’S OEUVRE, as one can do this spring at the Ryerson Image Centre, is an opportunity to meditate on how photography can simultaneously be a political act and a gesture of love and care. From the moment he took up the medium as a hobby earnestly, learning the trade through the dedicated Time-Life book collection and developing prints in his bathroom-turned-darkroom, it was paired with a growing sense of activist responsibility. A slender young Indian man, he had immigrated from New Delhi to Canada with his immediate family a few years prior, in 1969—“a month after Stonewall,” he likes to specify. The riots that galvanized gay liberation in North America resonated with him, as he would soon become increasingly involved with the movement in Montreal, through what he affectionately calls “Gay McGill.” The group, which often met informally at the apartment Gupta shared with his sister because of its proximity to campus, was a space to meet peers, talk openly, and organize.

An extended chosen family grew out of these connections, one in which the budding photographer trained his eye, snapping pictures of the quiet, joyous, radical moments that punctured their days: reading the papers, lounging, embracing, plunging in a pool with an inflatable penguin, marching. He published some of these images in the short-lived bilingual monthly newspaper , making the domestic and the intimate public. He also captured evidence of the prevalent homophobic sentiments of the time: the non-descript façades of the bars where he and his peers could express their sexuality freely, as well as the tragic