A Photographic Life - 62: Plus Sunil Gupta

In episode 62 UNP founder and curator Grant Scott is in his shed considering photography workshops and the promises they make, memory and photography from a personal perspective and and portrait photography made but not promoted.  Plus this week photographer Sunil Gupta takes on the challenge of supplying Grant with an audio file no longer than 5 minutes in length in which he answer’s the question ‘What Does Photography Mean to You?’ You can find out more about Niall McDiarmid's book Southwestern mentioned in this episode here www.niallmcdiarmid.com/books.php You can find out more about The Eye: How the World’s Most Influential Creative Directors Develop Their Vision by Nathan Williams mentioned in this episode here www.workman.com/products/the-eye Sunil Gupta was born in 1953, in New Delhi and now lives in London as a Canadian citizen. During the late 1960s, his family moved to Montreal, where he received his BA in Communications in 1977, at Concordia University. His thirst for an artistic education led him to New York and then England. After receiving his diploma in Photography at West Surrey College of Art & Design, in Farnham, Gupta decided to continue his academic education at The Royal College of Art in 1981. He then enrolled at the University of Surrey, where he gained an Honorary MA. In 1989, Sunil co-founded Autograph – the Association of Black Photographers, and a few years later participated in the birth of the Organisation for Visual Arts (OVA), aimed to promote a better understanding of culturally diverse visual arts practices. In 1995, he was diagnosed as HIV positive and decided not to let it rule, and eventually ruin, his life and decided to fight back. As an artist, he has always gravitated towards self-referential art exploration and expression, retaining his belief in the universal nature of the human condition. Coming from an Eastern culture and living in the West, Gupta felt it was only right to connect these two sides of the world in his work, bringing them closer to one another. His work has been extensively exhibited both nationally and internationally at the Pompidou Centre, Paris, ICA, London, The Serpentine Gallery, London, The Photographers Gallery, London and the Tate, Liverpool amongst many other museums and galleries. His work is also held in collections at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Tate, London, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography , National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa and George Eastman House, Rochester, New York. He has won multiple awards and his most recent books include Christopher Street 1976, Delhi: Communities of Belonging, Queer: Sunil Gupta, Wish You Were Here, and Pictures From Here. www.sunilgupta.net Grant Scott is the founder/curator of United Nations of Photography, a Senior Lecturer and Subject Co-ordinator: Photography at Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, a working photographer, and the author of Professional Photography: The New Global Landscape Explained (Focal Press 2014) and The Essential Student Guide to Professional Photography (Focal Press 2015). His next book New Ways of Seeing: The Democratic Language of Photography will be published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2019. He is currently work on his next documentary film project Woke Up This Morning: The Rock n’ Roll Thunder of Ray Lowry. His documentary film, Do Not Bend: The Photographic Life of Bill Jay can now be seen at www.youtube.com/watch?v=wd47549knOU&t=3915s. © Grant Scott 2019