‘It’s unusual for me to be in a space like this. Art and photography, in the UK anyway, have had a checkered relationship, so I wasn’t expecting to be here.’ Sat below a Roger Hilton painting in the Bechstein room at Kettle’s Yard, the photographer Sunil Gupta reflects on how his stunning new retrospective came to be in the exhibition gallery of the Cambridge institution, best known as the former abode of Jim and Helen Ede, and for their vast collection of 20th-century art that remains in situ.

‘The more I got to know about Jim Ede, it seemed appropriate. There was obviously something queer going on here.’ Indeed, ‘Life With a Camera, 1970 – Now’ (on display at Kettle’s Yard through 31 January 2027, before travelling to Ikon Gallery in Birmingham and Leeds Art Gallery) is an apt fit for the space: a great chunk of Gupta’s work is made in the home, while the notion of community has been at the centre of his practice for the past five decades, tethering it to the spirit of Kettle’s Yard.

Arranged chronologically, with curation by Andrew Nairne and Guy Haywood with Susie Biller, the new show opens with Friends and Lovers: Coming Out In Montréal. A largely domestic series displayed on a shelf characterised by Nairne as a mantelpiece (the descriptor gently underscoring the intimacy tied into the show’s moniker), the pictures were made in the early 1970s and highlight Gupta’s friends and family, as well as his introduction to the gay liberation movement.

Similarly domestic but more overtly posed, nearby is Lovers: Ten years On, in which lesbian and gay couples appear in their respective homes, positioned mostly in front of posters and paintings that speak to their wider interests. Gupta had followed his partner Rudi from Canada (he appears frequently in the earlier series) to the States, and then the UK, and the work, made in London in the mid-1980s, was a response to the break-up of their relationship.

‘I was interested in homosexual relationships from the beginning, and they seem to mostly be domestic,’ he observes. ‘Unless it’s a demonstration, there’s very little queer public life. I haven’t seen it since Christopher Street [in New York] in 1976, when there was a very visible, middle-of-the-day presence on the streets. In London it was all indoors.’

Perhaps his most recognisable work, the Christopher Street series was made during a semester studying under Lissette Model at the New School for Social Research in New York, and was conceived as a kind of social anthropology, documenting men as they strode around the New York neighbourhood synonymous with gay life, after Stonewall and before Aids. The images now read as both cool and celebratory – nostalgic too – and at Kettle’s Yard are strikingly placed so as to be the first thing visitors see, hung close together on a red-pink wall (upstairs, contact sheets from the series are laid out in a vitrine against the same bright shade).

As per the foundations of Gupta’s practice, his own identities feed much of the show’s content – being gay, Indian, and HIV positive – and subsequently there are a number of self-portraits, while other projects emerge from questions relevant to his circumstances (the photographer’s voice, additionally, guides visitors through via wall panels).

Significantly larger than ‘From Here to Eternity’, his 2020 survey at The Photographers’ Gallery in London, ‘Life With a Camera’ includes more than 140 works. ‘That show was following a photography thread and highlighting not just the queer stuff, but my history with race,’ says Gupta, a founding member of Autograph (Association of Black Photographers), which was established in an era when Black was used more broadly as a political signifier against the racist landscape of 1980s Britain. ‘Here, I think Andrew Nairne wanted to maybe try to liberate me from the sociology of the work.

‘It’s fun to see what gets emphasised,’ he adds. ‘Nobody’s ever shown the pictures of the children with HIV, for example. Most people just want me to be Black and gay.’ Made in New Delhi in 2005, where Gupta was living until 2012 (and where he met his husband, Charan Singh, with whom he now lives in London and collaborates often), A Time to Care was made with the Naz Foundation, which ran a care home for children navigating life after diagnosis. The pictures, of flip-flopped feet and anonymised toddlers in arms, are far removed from the photographer’s series Homelands, exploring his own relationship to the virus, which the exhibition includes in the same room. Marrying images made in the UK, India, US and Canada, here, Gupta juxtaposes his undressed body with fields of green, describing them as ‘benign pictures of landscapes through which a terrifying virus was spreading’.

Further context is provided upstairs, where the themes and scope of Gupta’s work are examined through a different lens: newspaper clippings insert his pictures into Aids narratives, exhibition posters highlight the organisations he’s worked with, a table full of books, amongst them the exhibition catalogue and new Trolley Books title I Call You My Love, speak to his prolific output.

There are framed photographs also, like the Helmut Lang A/W 2020 campaign revisiting Christopher Street (creative director Thomas Cawson had been inspired by the original series), and a portrait of Gupta and Singh, shot recently in the house at Kettle’s Yard for Lovers, Revisited. Building on the series he made 40 years ago, the picture is part of a larger body of work, now international but still centered around people he knows personally, exploring what queer couples look like today. ‘We appear wherever the work takes us,’ says Gupta, ‘and it takes us to a lot of places.’ In each instance, the camera claims its presence, as ‘Life With a Camera’ boldly asserts.

‘Sunil Gupta: Life with a Camera, 1970 – Now’ is at Kettle’s Yard until 31 January 2027