Tate Photography: Sunil Gupta

"I feel most comfortable among people in various diasporas. I don't feel like I have one specific home; everywhere is home and nowhere is home."

Sunil Gupta was born in 1953 in New Delhi, India, and moved to Canada as a teenager in the late 1960s. He now lives and works in London.

Over a career spanning more than four decades, Gupta has maintained a visionary approach to photography, producing bodies of work that are pioneering in their social and political commentary. The artist's diasporic experience of multiple cultures informs a practice dedicated to themes of race, migration, and queer identity. His own lived experience serves as a point of departure for photographic projects, born from a desire to see himself and others like him represented in art history.

Working in India, the United States, and the UK, his best-known works include the Exiles series (1986-7), Lovers: Ten Years On (1984-6), the series From Here to Eternity (1999), and Songs of Deliverance (2022). His newspaper articles, speeches, and essays demonstrate his crucial role at the centre of grassroots queer and postcolonial organising throughout his career. He continues to forge his own cultural history, fusing the public and the personal through photographs that highlight those marginalised in society.