For Gupta, there was a particular importance to the queer community he photographed for his Christopher Street series, named after the New York street synonymous with Stonewall and the city\u2019s first Pride march. The area was animated by what he calls \u201cthis massive amount of visibility in the day. People were essentially promenading. They were cruising, but they were also showing themselves off\u201d. That openness, captured in Gupta\u2019s photographs of easy, public intimacy, stood in stark contrast to what awaited him when he returned to the UK. There was no equivalent to Christopher Street, he says, and no \u201cdaytime visibility\u201d, with everybody \u201cback in the closet.\u201d<\/p>\n
For decades, Gupta\u2019s work has explored the uneasy relationship between legislation and visibility. \u201cAt each place, in each decade, there\u2019s a different issue or set of laws. There\u2019s a sensibility around what you are allowed to show, or what curators deem acceptable to be shown,\u201d he says. While working with Tessa Boffin on the landmark exhibition Ecstatic Antibodies: Resisting the AIDS Mythology (1990), he recalls sensing curators backing away, \u201cnot interested in even starting a discussion\u201d.<\/p>\n
While this has changed in the UK, it remains contested elsewhere in Gupta\u2019s practice. Speaking about the lack of queer visibility in India in the 00s, for example, he describes feeling \u201cprovoked and challenged to change the situation\u201d, making work that could push at the boundaries of what galleries were willing to show.<\/p>\n The changing nature of art across Gupta\u2019s life and career isn\u2019t only visible in what galleries were willing to show, but in the kinds of work artists felt able to make. Reflecting on how his HIV diagnosis changed his own approach, Gupta explains, \u201cI think the 80s were quite separatist in a way. If you\u2019re Black, you made Black work; if you\u2019re a woman, you made women\u2019s work. And I was gay, and I made gay, Black, South Asian work. And I was kind of painting myself into a corner, and I thought that if I added Aids to it, then there\u2019d be few people left that I could speak to.\u201d<\/p>\n Falling ill led to what Gupta describes as a \u201cpost-diagnosis slump\u201d \u2013 something he had already witnessed through Ecstatic Antibodies and his work volunteering as a \u2018buddy\u2019, supporting people who were newly diagnosed. He eventually returned to the darkroom as a form of \u201cphoto-therapy\u201d, a process he describes as empowering and one that changed his relationship to his body in the wake of his diagnosis.<\/p>\n<\/a>
![\"Sunil](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/1453820.jpg\")
Sunil Gupta, Untitled #22 from Christopher Street
\n(1976).Image courtesy the artist and Hales Gallery, Materi\u00e0 Gallery, SepiaEye, Stephen Bulger Gallery and Vadehra Art Gallery. \u00a9 Sunil Gupta. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2025.<\/p>\n
![\"Sunil](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/1453823.jpeg\")
Sunil Gupta, Diepiriye from Mr Malhotra’s Party