Raju, from the series ‘Mr Malhotra’s Party’, 2007

A Subject Revisited

We move around in a world proliferated by the most rhetorical images that beseech us to feel tempted, look desirable, aspire, sympathize, feel nostalgic, and what not. It is a world that is ‘visible’ to us and evidenced by its very representation. To be witness to an event, and to be seen as being witness to an event, all constitute the ‘present’. From cameras on cell phones to social networking websites, we have reached a point where our images determine our presence and whereabouts in the world. So, what would it be about the arc of any individual artistic career today that may interest us, particularly so, in the domain of photography? Moreover, what role after all does the ‘author’ play any more in this prolific accumulation of images? Maybe the question might have more pertinence than mere copyright issues if that artistic career is the subject, the object, and the narrative of a certain body of photographic works.

It is not the teleology of Sunil Gupta’s career that moves me as much as how the photographer, his subject-matter (himself many-a-times), and the narrative (i.e. his career) collapse into one and the same entity, the photographs. It is, therefore, not even important whether Sunil Gupta had clicked the photographs himself, or if it is him who has been clicked in them.

In his earlier series such as Tresspass 2 (1990s), Gupta brought into a single frame, incongruous juxtapositions of himself on the one hand, and ‘popular’ images or old family pictures on the other. He employed the technique of appropriation to make the use of sources almost immediately accessible and recognizable in what they don’t show. He had therefore inverted the process of appropriation, incorporating the unlikely syncopating, re-contextualizing, and slowing down of discernibility to the point of estranging notions of the popular. This strategy created space for thinking about ‘other’ identities through the
presence of his own body.

In Wish You Were Here, however, the series considers the difficulty of documenting knowledge of anyone, and the dependence on the inanimate and mute narratives of pictures (albums, autographs), the tableaux, as well as the anecdotal. But even here, something eludes vision and documentation, and this is not to say that some absence appears in these pictures. Wish you were here is a monographic book of and by Sunil Gupta, that at first glance appears to be just a chronicle of a life lived. Page after page, one finds documented important moments in Gupta’s life, memorable locations, and just about everyone Gupta may have felt a sense of attachment with.

There are a range of approaches to the photographs taken as well, mostly portraits: some are imbued with deep intimacy, some dandy, many that remind you of family albums, tourist photographs, and still others taken on the street. None of them, however, compromise on being stylistically expressive. Yet, there is a haunting nature to this autobiographical work. As AIDS shadows nearly all of his current work, he deftly traverses the muter impasses of desires swirling around and within the gay community.

Sunil Gupta’s photographs have rarely amplified the elusiveness of transitory urban life, of cities pulsing with information. On the contrary, he brings to view human networks more complex than the city’s obscured veins of infrastructure, of individual navigating systems within systems. As a narrative, its structure plays with the fragmentary nature of the city, where any corner, any square, any home holds multitudes of stories, looming in an out of view.

Gupta’s concerns are clearly away from a formal investigation of the photographic apparatuses, and more towards the fluid relationships between himself and others. What is most compelling to me is that in the Wish You Were Here series, there are no others, though most of them are ‘others’ including Sunil Gupta. His work is autobiographical, precisely in defining himself through his encounters with other people. This precise and ambivalent move splinters the narrative by dispersing the subject (i.e., Sunil) into many other personae. It is a subjectivity inscribed, if not subsumed, by photographic media. This is remarkably distinct from the ever so talked about ‘othering’ that photography has always perpetrated for over a century. Rather, the visible is held with empathy, a sense familiarity and warmth. The self finds itself in others.

This, I would think, makes up for a photographic ‘excess’ very distinct from the quotidian excess that surrounds us with the ubiquity of media. It is not as simple as the post-modern turn that Baudrillard traces with the explosion of copies with no original. The space Gupta opens is that of an incremental excess, an accretion onto that which is already present. In due course, what begins as the main incident becomes the outer limit of frame and vice-versa. The margin turns into scene with the unpredictable intersection of chance and attention, which takes us beyond that ‘decisive moment’ when the photograph was taken. The works are in the end about the “communities, acts, thoughts, body parts, practices and desires that are a part of our lives but absent from our visual imaginations, our languages and our politics.”[1]

Though a Memoir, Sunil’s move casts away the question of veracity in these documentary images, since the document requires its maker to remain outside the document, be it spatially or temporally. Sunil Gupta takes us into a territory we are already very familiar with, i.e., family album photographs, but questions where the maker of any document is situated. The tactic, if we can call it one, is unlike the deliberate and scrupulous manipulation of documents to weave a more complex narrative as in the ‘Re-take of Amrita’ series by Vivan Sundaram. There is also a refrain from citation and irony as in the works by Pushpamala. Though the mode of testimony has burgeoned in a huge way in contemporary Indian art, particularly video art, Gupta initiates a commentary from outside and from within his photographs at the same time, and whether it is his voice of today, or of yesteryears; they become indiscernible. The document, its subject, and its maker are in the same fold. We come across photographs that look similar quite often, but the same can not be said for what this series achieves in unfolding.

Mohd. Ahmad Sabih has been involved in doing research and archiving with art-critics, artists and auction houses. His area of interest is in investigating the infrastructure and the institutions of art in the county.

Untitled, from the series ‘Tresspass 2’, 1993

Kaushiki, from the series ‘Mr Malhotra’s Party’,  2007

Picture Courtesy : Sunil Gupta

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