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The great pretender …
Sunil Gupta thumbs his nose at Thatcher’s infamous Clause 28 with his quietly powerful 1988/2020 series “Pretended” Family Relationships, mixing love, poetry and protest. The title is a reference to the clause’s incendiary lines prohibiting the promotion of “the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship”.
Pieces of you …
Those “pretended” families are pointedly ordinary in Gupta’s three-part photo works. Far from Clause 28’s “othering”, his portraits of gay couples include men and women of diverse heritage, hanging out at home or in the street. Nonetheless, these are lives forced to the margins and Gupta’s cropped imagery and fragmented text would seem to reflect this: glimpses of protests against the infamous clause and enigmatic lines by the photographer’s then partner, the poet and academic Stephen Dodd.
Lovers and fighters …
“If anger is a sign of love, our signs have locked like scorpions,” reads the snippet that accompanies this image of a couple feeling the first shockwaves of the clause in 1988. The reference to aligned star signs (the classic first-date joke question), the laidback poses and everyday setting are typical of Gupta’s work, gracefully marrying seriousness of purpose with a disarming casualness and gentle humour.
Street life …
Gupta has spoken of his early years in India and the history of the country’s journey to independence as key to his awareness of the political potential of images. He first began photographing out-and-proud gay men, often migrants such as himself, on the streets of New York in the 1970s, before the tragedy of the Aids crisis. Having escaped a restrictive background to study business in the United States, he soon switched to art, picked up a camera and found his calling. That early project, Christopher Street, was a highlight of this year’s Masculinities show at the Barbican Art Gallery. Since that brief halcyon period in the post-Stonewall 1970s, Gupta has gone on to create a globally switched-on range of politically sharp work tackling sexuality and cultural identity.
Time will tell …
We now know that there is a happy ending of sorts for the couples and protesters from this 1988 series, albeit a double-edged one. Clause 28 was revoked – but it took another 15 years to get there.
Included in In Focus: Sunil Gupta, Hales Gallery online
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