A Walk Down Christopher Street

MOI Meets: The story behind Sunil Gupta’s iconic work?

For this Pride month, we chat to photographer Sunil Gupta to learn the story behind Christopher Street - his iconic photo series depicting gay New York in the post-Stonewall 1970s – and the secret to his success as an acclaimed photographer.?

MOI: How did your career in photography start??

Sunil: I began with family snaps and then I was very fortunate in that I arrived in the West in ‘69 straight after Stonewall -? I went to college and gay liberation happened when I was still like only 17 or 18. There was a gay liberation university group that I joined in Montreal, we had a publication and I volunteered to be its photographer. So then, aside from my domestic family snaps, I had an audience - I was taking pictures that were reproduced and got to be seen. The photographs became about all kinds of things that we thought were important at the time, there was a mixture of activities like very early public protests. Or I just documented gay bars – from the outside - there weren’t any pictures of them at that time. All kinds of gay groups were springing up. So suddenly there were gay Catholics and gay Jews and gay walking groups, all that stuff we have now, it all was sort of starting to happen then.?

MOI: There's something really interesting about your photographs – I’m thinking specifically of the Christopher Street series - and wondered what was the story behind them???

Sunil: With Christopher Street I was just cruising with the camera - it was the days of “too many men and not enough time”. It was quicker to do it with the camera. And here in New York it was the first time I'd come across a very gay, very public space in the daytime. Up until then, gay life all happened at night. And kind of in the dark, so to speak, so you only saw people in venues. But this was very open and so I was able to hang out and walk up and down or just wait on the corner and there would be hundreds of gay men coming by. And I just picked the ones I wanted to get to know and I’d just go up to them and take a picture. And also I realized that people were on the street promenading, so they'd come to see other people. So everybody was seeing, and also wanting to be seen so it was a very public display of cruising if you like. It wasn't hostile in any way, so I felt able to just go up to people. Mind you also I was only 24 then or something. So hopefully the pictures have got that feeling of cruising of, you know, when you catch an eye and you just sort of know that it's something.

MOI: What is your secret to getting attention and turning heads with your photography???

Sunil: Sunil: If it involves subject matter that’s other people, then I try to make a picture that’s engaged from the camera’s point of view with the subject. Photography is about light; it’s mostly about catching the right kind of light on the right type of subject and then it’s framing.?

I guess I’ve got a formal interest and background in modernism so there’s kind of a formality to the framing. I basically train by looking through the lens in the camera but imagining I was the audience, so I’m always thinking what the print will look like; I’ve always been interested primarily in the print. I quite enjoy the process so I'm very interested in the one that's current, that's happening in the now and then actually, once it's done, then I move on to the next one. So that's what happened to Christopher Street. It just lay in the files between ‘76 and 2018. I'd never looked at them. No one had ever seen them.?

MOI: I read that you've done fashion photography for a designer brand connected with the Christopher Street series. What was the story behind this??

Sunil: That was Helmut Lang. In 2018, the Christopher Street book had just come out. And their designer had come across the book and got in touch with me - it seemed like he had based his collection that season on the book. And so this was something new to me, I had no idea that my sort of documentary photos had a kind of fashion quality to them.? I wasn’t thinking about what the men in the photos were wearing. So then they said would I come in and shoot the collection in Christopher Street or around Christopher Street - and I agreed.? It was a kind of novel experience for me. I don't normally do fashion. It was New York Fashion Week and instead of having a catwalk of the clothes, they made a photography exhibition in their shop so they took all the clothes away and just put pictures up of the new clothes. And they also had prints from my old pictures of Christopher Street, so that's what they presented.

MOI: Did you have a message or agenda with your artwork – of almost wanting to change people's views??

Sunil: I had a big gay agenda. I wanted to take pictures of gay men in particular, because I thought that as gay men we were kind of boxed into this kind of sexualized, body image corner and we didn't seem to have any other kind of life. That is the kind of correlation between porn and gay and photography. I was interested more in the broader picture and in relationships and all of that and in that decade in the 80s, that's kind of what was happening. And it was kind of self-perpetuating, so the commercial gay scene of course was a lot of photography and it had centre spreads which were basically very erotic male nudes and that was pretty much it.? And then the media and the state were responding by saying, well, these are a lot of very amoral promiscuous men. So when aids came along, it was like “well, they deserved it”, you know, and then Clause 28 happened which was also in that language of “pretend families”. So I've had a kind of agenda to make gay men’s lives more multifaceted.?

MOI: Do you think art can change the world??

Sunil: Hopefully. I think what art can do better than the media is start a discussion because it’s not censored. I was able to make what I wanted to make for myself as an artist, something I couldn't do for Fleet Street, where I worked before in editorial. When I worked for Fleet Street, I was always hired to do somebody else's job for somebody and then the paper or the magazine had their editorial people and their vision of the world stamped on it. So no matter what you shot, they wrote the story the way they wanted to.?

With my art I have control over what’s coming out, like the book Christopher Street - I have say over it and then people discuss it and that hopefully leads to some change in something. I thought my story was particularly missing so I made a big effort to tell it.?

MOI: You've got pictures in the Tate. How did all that happen? Is it something that you wanted to make happen - like you had a dream to make it happen - or did it just happen??

Sunil: Quite a lot happened. So in the 80s some of us thought that the museums were maybe very kind of problematic and we didn't want to really deal with the commercial fine art world at all, or that whole gallery world and being collected by these big national institutions. However, I did eventually get approached by some dealers in New York. And one of them tried to sell pictures to the Tate, and then they ended up wanting to buy them. I think because they were particularly about London.

MOI: It doesn't sound like you had dreams of being famous then??

Sunil: No, I didn't really. Not in that way. I wanted to be a photographer promoting social change but I ended up in the arts side. It's a little bit of a mystery to me how it happened. So these third party people like the galleries do the hustling, I don't do it directly. Then there seems to be a kind of path. I guess once a few major public collections acquire something by you it starts to build up something and I think I may have been lucky that I came with something that was kind of hidden at the time when I was making it and suddenly now it's come out into the open and there's a great interest in the 80s and there's a big interest in things queer. I also think that what happened is because I've survived long enough and then my work got recognized in my lifetime, which may not have happened and hasn't happened for some people.?

MOI: What is the key to success as an artist, do you think??

Sunil: With being successful I would suggest following whatever it is that you want to do or say or photograph or make pictures of, rather than looking at what’s fashionable. Do what you want to do even if it doesn’t at first seem what’s out there. That’s what I’ve done, it just meant that it’s taken a while for it to catch on. So what is successful, if you like, is largely a stroke of accident or good fortune so I’ve never paid it too much attention. I was taking these pictures just for me.?

With my work, I'm trying to be transparent, so I'm trying to present what I see. We all have histories and stories to tell and I think it's a privilege to be able to tell your own.

Sunil Gupta is a photographer based in London. His work is held in major public and private collections in the world?including the Museum of Modern Art?in New York,?Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the?Tate. In 2020 he was awarded?Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society - and had a major retrospective of his work at The Photographer’s?Gallery, London. For over four decades,?he has?created pioneering work exploring themes of race, migration, family and?queer identity.?

You can find his work at https://www.sunilgupta.net.?

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