Sunil Gupta, London 82′, 2021

In the early 1980’s, Sunil Gupta enrolled at the Royal College of Art in London, where he had access to colour negative processing facilities. He took to the streets of the capital in search of the centres gay London life around Earl’s Court, King’s Road, and the West End. “I hoped to repeat my experience of Christopher Street in New York, except now in London and in colour. It wasn’t to be. Even what appeared to be a concentration of gay life was not dense enough to create its own public space, so I was getting either huge gaps between people or a crowd of very mixed people. I decided to abandon an exclusively gay subject and started concentrating on whatever caught my eye—migrants, people of colour, gay men, elderly people out and about on their own.”

— Sunil Gupta

This series recently resurfaced through Gupta’s process of archiving his past images, providing a catalogue of the Sloanes, New Romantic and pensioners who once roamed London’s streets.