So, just to start off, could you talk us through the photographs we’re standing in front of?
This set of pictures came about as a commission for the exhibition Reflections of the Black Experience - I believe there were ten of us with ten pictures each - which opened in Brixton Art Gallery in 1986. There were relatively few South Asians in the group; at that point, a lot of us were calling ourselves ‘black’ in a kind of political way, for solidarity. In a postcolonial sense, if you like, it included a lot of people who’d been part of Britain’s colonies beginning with the Irish, it was very inclusive. I thought if there were seven Afro-Caribbeans and three South Asians, there might be an imbalance in the subjects, so I’d better make mine about South Asians, then I took ten ‘issues’ and made a picture of each of them. Also I was coming out of training and had a great interest in becoming a photojournalist, or documentary photographer, but that was not working out with my postcolonial sensibility; it meant photographing people who did not know and publishing them somewhere else.
This first one here is entitled Migrant, and shows somebody waiting at Heathrow with a head covering. I wanted it to be quite simple and readable; it wasn’t strictly speaking documentary - although we were at Heathrow - but the woman in question was an actress. Unfortunately, she later became very famous and became the first Asian person in Eastenders, so she became very recognisable which wasn’t the plan!
In this photo, this is me and my partner. We went to pose in front of My Beautiful Laundrette, which had just opened at the Coronet in Notting Hill. This one is just called Gay, as a way of depicting it, because there was a discussion about My Beautiful Laundrette and multi-racial gay relationships. So each one has a single-word title that is about an issue that affects South Asians in this country, so migration, homosexuality, family lives… There are others that are not here about activism; I had a picture of somebody who worked for the Newham Seven, a lobbying group in East London.
Could you tell us a little more about the titles? The sparse naming almost feels like a response to people being reduced to one facet of their being.
There’s the saying that a picture speaks a thousand words, so we don’t have a lot of text. Of course exhibitions seem to need explanatory text, but I didn’t want to have some big caption underneath.
What was it that made photography such a potent art form for protest in the 1980s?
Oh, I think because for a lot of us, our day job was working for the press as freelancers, so we were very conscious of the reach of the printed press at the time. Of course, more and more television was taking over, but there was definitely a lot of scope to use photography - not just in the press, which was often right-wing-led, but also there was a lot of educational photographic work produced in this country at the time. There were groups like Camera Work in London; for example, we did an LGBT show at Camera Work and a workshop with secondary school children in London. They were given a camera to make a photo-story about what it’s like to come out in school, and we made laminated prints which became a vehicle for letting these pictures travel with a message. That became a staple, where these travelling shows would appear all over the country to talk about aspect - the miner’s strike, or whatever was going on.
That makes sense, considering you’ve credited this photo series [Reflections of the Black Experience] with bringing you into grassroots politics, that it evolved into photography as politics…
Yeah, I made the decision in 1983 after graduating from the RCA, not to go to Cork Street to find a gallery and become an artist, but instead to go across the river to the town hall where I met the GLC and became involved with them. I learned about the party-political activity, that sense of how culture can work for everyone’s advantage in that way. They were willing to finance it and they had space, so they put on shows like Reflections. So I learned about grassroots work, then the Reflections show led to a period of no funding because Margaret Thatcher shut the GLC and took away our main source of funding. But what the show had done was bring a number of photographers of colour together, so we just kept meeting to figure out what could happen next. Over a two-year period, people came and went - I think a number of people misunderstood it to be a commercial agency, and when they found it was just a place for people to talk politics, they left. After a couple of years, the last little group that was left went to the Arts Council to officially form something, which became Autograph, which is still around in a different shape now.
So, how does it feel to see such a major institution now basing a whole show around what was once seen as countercultural?
Well it’s quite ironic, because when we made the work, this institution was the enemy, we never went to it! Tate represented sugar, which represented plantations and slavery, so we never came here. The art world wasn’t interested in photography anyway, and certainly by people of colour… It’s taken them forty years to learn about it and it isn’t quite right, but let’s hope it will be in some future time.
That’s interesting - what would you suggest to improve in future, if that isn’t too controversial a question?
Well, like everything, the politics of this exhibition exist not in that time but in this time… So, in this time, we’re looking at the Black Lives Matter movement and the African diaspora experience, and that’s come to the fore and that’s reflected here. There’s remarkably fewer people of Indian and South Asian heritage, which doesn’t sit with the politics of the 80s. There would have been more equal representation.
Sunil Gupta’s work is featured in The 80s: Photographing Britain, showing at Tate Britain until 5th May 2025.
So, just to start off, could you talk us through the photographs we’re standing in front of?
This set of pictures came about as a commission for the exhibition Reflections of the Black Experience - I believe there were ten of us with ten pictures each - which opened in Brixton Art Gallery in 1986. There were relatively few South Asians in the group; at that point, a lot of us were calling ourselves ‘black’ in a kind of political way, for solidarity. In a postcolonial sense, if you like, it included a lot of people who’d been part of Britain’s colonies beginning with the Irish, it was very inclusive. I thought if there were seven Afro-Caribbeans and three South Asians, there might be an imbalance in the subjects, so I’d better make mine about South Asians, then I took ten ‘issues’ and made a picture of each of them. Also I was coming out of training and had a great interest in becoming a photojournalist, or documentary photographer, but that was not working out with my postcolonial sensibility; it meant photographing people who did not know and publishing them somewhere else.
This first one here is entitled Migrant, and shows somebody waiting at Heathrow with a head covering. I wanted it to be quite simple and readable; it wasn’t strictly speaking documentary - although we were at Heathrow - but the woman in question was an actress. Unfortunately, she later became very famous and became the first Asian person in Eastenders, so she became very recognisable which wasn’t the plan!
In this photo, this is me and my partner. We went to pose in front of My Beautiful Laundrette, which had just opened at the Coronet in Notting Hill. This one is just called Gay, as a way of depicting it, because there was a discussion about My Beautiful Laundrette and multi-racial gay relationships. So each one has a single-word title that is about an issue that affects South Asians in this country, so migration, homosexuality, family lives… There are others that are not here about activism; I had a picture of somebody who worked for the Newham Seven, a lobbying group in East London.
Could you tell us a little more about the titles? The sparse naming almost feels like a response to people being reduced to one facet of their being.
There’s the saying that a picture speaks a thousand words, so we don’t have a lot of text. Of course exhibitions seem to need explanatory text, but I didn’t want to have some big caption underneath.
What was it that made photography such a potent art form for protest in the 1980s?
Oh, I think because for a lot of us, our day job was working for the press as freelancers, so we were very conscious of the reach of the printed press at the time. Of course, more and more television was taking over, but there was definitely a lot of scope to use photography - not just in the press, which was often right-wing-led, but also there was a lot of educational photographic work produced in this country at the time. There were groups like Camera Work in London; for example, we did an LGBT show at Camera Work and a workshop with secondary school children in London. They were given a camera to make a photo-story about what it’s like to come out in school, and we made laminated prints which became a vehicle for letting these pictures travel with a message. That became a staple, where these travelling shows would appear all over the country to talk about aspect - the miner’s strike, or whatever was going on.
That makes sense, considering you’ve credited this photo series [Reflections of the Black Experience] with bringing you into grassroots politics, that it evolved into photography as politics…
Yeah, I made the decision in 1983 after graduating from the RCA, not to go to Cork Street to find a gallery and become an artist, but instead to go across the river to the town hall where I met the GLC and became involved with them. I learned about the party-political activity, that sense of how culture can work for everyone’s advantage in that way. They were willing to finance it and they had space, so they put on shows like Reflections. So I learned about grassroots work, then the Reflections show led to a period of no funding because Margaret Thatcher shut the GLC and took away our main source of funding. But what the show had done was bring a number of photographers of colour together, so we just kept meeting to figure out what could happen next. Over a two-year period, people came and went - I think a number of people misunderstood it to be a commercial agency, and when they found it was just a place for people to talk politics, they left. After a couple of years, the last little group that was left went to the Arts Council to officially form something, which became Autograph, which is still around in a different shape now.
So, how does it feel to see such a major institution now basing a whole show around what was once seen as countercultural?
Well it’s quite ironic, because when we made the work, this institution was the enemy, we never went to it! Tate represented sugar, which represented plantations and slavery, so we never came here. The art world wasn’t interested in photography anyway, and certainly by people of colour… It’s taken them forty years to learn about it and it isn’t quite right, but let’s hope it will be in some future time.
That’s interesting - what would you suggest to improve in future, if that isn’t too controversial a question?
Well, like everything, the politics of this exhibition exist not in that time but in this time… So, in this time, we’re looking at the Black Lives Matter movement and the African diaspora experience, and that’s come to the fore and that’s reflected here. There’s remarkably fewer people of Indian and South Asian heritage, which doesn’t sit with the politics of the 80s. There would have been more equal representation.
Sunil Gupta’s work is featured in The 80s: Photographing Britain, showing at Tate Britain until 5th May 2025.
So, just to start off, could you talk us through the photographs we’re standing in front of?
This set of pictures came about as a commission for the exhibition Reflections of the Black Experience - I believe there were ten of us with ten pictures each - which opened in Brixton Art Gallery in 1986. There were relatively few South Asians in the group; at that point, a lot of us were calling ourselves ‘black’ in a kind of political way, for solidarity. In a postcolonial sense, if you like, it included a lot of people who’d been part of Britain’s colonies beginning with the Irish, it was very inclusive. I thought if there were seven Afro-Caribbeans and three South Asians, there might be an imbalance in the subjects, so I’d better make mine about South Asians, then I took ten ‘issues’ and made a picture of each of them. Also I was coming out of training and had a great interest in becoming a photojournalist, or documentary photographer, but that was not working out with my postcolonial sensibility; it meant photographing people who did not know and publishing them somewhere else.
This first one here is entitled Migrant, and shows somebody waiting at Heathrow with a head covering. I wanted it to be quite simple and readable; it wasn’t strictly speaking documentary - although we were at Heathrow - but the woman in question was an actress. Unfortunately, she later became very famous and became the first Asian person in Eastenders, so she became very recognisable which wasn’t the plan!
In this photo, this is me and my partner. We went to pose in front of My Beautiful Laundrette, which had just opened at the Coronet in Notting Hill. This one is just called Gay, as a way of depicting it, because there was a discussion about My Beautiful Laundrette and multi-racial gay relationships. So each one has a single-word title that is about an issue that affects South Asians in this country, so migration, homosexuality, family lives… There are others that are not here about activism; I had a picture of somebody who worked for the Newham Seven, a lobbying group in East London.
Could you tell us a little more about the titles? The sparse naming almost feels like a response to people being reduced to one facet of their being.
There’s the saying that a picture speaks a thousand words, so we don’t have a lot of text. Of course exhibitions seem to need explanatory text, but I didn’t want to have some big caption underneath.
What was it that made photography such a potent art form for protest in the 1980s?
Oh, I think because for a lot of us, our day job was working for the press as freelancers, so we were very conscious of the reach of the printed press at the time. Of course, more and more television was taking over, but there was definitely a lot of scope to use photography - not just in the press, which was often right-wing-led, but also there was a lot of educational photographic work produced in this country at the time. There were groups like Camera Work in London; for example, we did an LGBT show at Camera Work and a workshop with secondary school children in London. They were given a camera to make a photo-story about what it’s like to come out in school, and we made laminated prints which became a vehicle for letting these pictures travel with a message. That became a staple, where these travelling shows would appear all over the country to talk about aspect - the miner’s strike, or whatever was going on.
That makes sense, considering you’ve credited this photo series [Reflections of the Black Experience] with bringing you into grassroots politics, that it evolved into photography as politics…
Yeah, I made the decision in 1983 after graduating from the RCA, not to go to Cork Street to find a gallery and become an artist, but instead to go across the river to the town hall where I met the GLC and became involved with them. I learned about the party-political activity, that sense of how culture can work for everyone’s advantage in that way. They were willing to finance it and they had space, so they put on shows like Reflections. So I learned about grassroots work, then the Reflections show led to a period of no funding because Margaret Thatcher shut the GLC and took away our main source of funding. But what the show had done was bring a number of photographers of colour together, so we just kept meeting to figure out what could happen next. Over a two-year period, people came and went - I think a number of people misunderstood it to be a commercial agency, and when they found it was just a place for people to talk politics, they left. After a couple of years, the last little group that was left went to the Arts Council to officially form something, which became Autograph, which is still around in a different shape now.
So, how does it feel to see such a major institution now basing a whole show around what was once seen as countercultural?
Well it’s quite ironic, because when we made the work, this institution was the enemy, we never went to it! Tate represented sugar, which represented plantations and slavery, so we never came here. The art world wasn’t interested in photography anyway, and certainly by people of colour… It’s taken them forty years to learn about it and it isn’t quite right, but let’s hope it will be in some future time.
That’s interesting - what would you suggest to improve in future, if that isn’t too controversial a question?
Well, like everything, the politics of this exhibition exist not in that time but in this time… So, in this time, we’re looking at the Black Lives Matter movement and the African diaspora experience, and that’s come to the fore and that’s reflected here. There’s remarkably fewer people of Indian and South Asian heritage, which doesn’t sit with the politics of the 80s. There would have been more equal representation.
Sunil Gupta’s work is featured in The 80s: Photographing Britain, showing at Tate Britain until 5th May 2025.
So, just to start off, could you talk us through the photographs we’re standing in front of?
This set of pictures came about as a commission for the exhibition Reflections of the Black Experience - I believe there were ten of us with ten pictures each - which opened in Brixton Art Gallery in 1986. There were relatively few South Asians in the group; at that point, a lot of us were calling ourselves ‘black’ in a kind of political way, for solidarity. In a postcolonial sense, if you like, it included a lot of people who’d been part of Britain’s colonies beginning with the Irish, it was very inclusive. I thought if there were seven Afro-Caribbeans and three South Asians, there might be an imbalance in the subjects, so I’d better make mine about South Asians, then I took ten ‘issues’ and made a picture of each of them. Also I was coming out of training and had a great interest in becoming a photojournalist, or documentary photographer, but that was not working out with my postcolonial sensibility; it meant photographing people who did not know and publishing them somewhere else.
This first one here is entitled Migrant, and shows somebody waiting at Heathrow with a head covering. I wanted it to be quite simple and readable; it wasn’t strictly speaking documentary - although we were at Heathrow - but the woman in question was an actress. Unfortunately, she later became very famous and became the first Asian person in Eastenders, so she became very recognisable which wasn’t the plan!
In this photo, this is me and my partner. We went to pose in front of My Beautiful Laundrette, which had just opened at the Coronet in Notting Hill. This one is just called Gay, as a way of depicting it, because there was a discussion about My Beautiful Laundrette and multi-racial gay relationships. So each one has a single-word title that is about an issue that affects South Asians in this country, so migration, homosexuality, family lives… There are others that are not here about activism; I had a picture of somebody who worked for the Newham Seven, a lobbying group in East London.
Could you tell us a little more about the titles? The sparse naming almost feels like a response to people being reduced to one facet of their being.
There’s the saying that a picture speaks a thousand words, so we don’t have a lot of text. Of course exhibitions seem to need explanatory text, but I didn’t want to have some big caption underneath.
What was it that made photography such a potent art form for protest in the 1980s?
Oh, I think because for a lot of us, our day job was working for the press as freelancers, so we were very conscious of the reach of the printed press at the time. Of course, more and more television was taking over, but there was definitely a lot of scope to use photography - not just in the press, which was often right-wing-led, but also there was a lot of educational photographic work produced in this country at the time. There were groups like Camera Work in London; for example, we did an LGBT show at Camera Work and a workshop with secondary school children in London. They were given a camera to make a photo-story about what it’s like to come out in school, and we made laminated prints which became a vehicle for letting these pictures travel with a message. That became a staple, where these travelling shows would appear all over the country to talk about aspect - the miner’s strike, or whatever was going on.
That makes sense, considering you’ve credited this photo series [Reflections of the Black Experience] with bringing you into grassroots politics, that it evolved into photography as politics…
Yeah, I made the decision in 1983 after graduating from the RCA, not to go to Cork Street to find a gallery and become an artist, but instead to go across the river to the town hall where I met the GLC and became involved with them. I learned about the party-political activity, that sense of how culture can work for everyone’s advantage in that way. They were willing to finance it and they had space, so they put on shows like Reflections. So I learned about grassroots work, then the Reflections show led to a period of no funding because Margaret Thatcher shut the GLC and took away our main source of funding. But what the show had done was bring a number of photographers of colour together, so we just kept meeting to figure out what could happen next. Over a two-year period, people came and went - I think a number of people misunderstood it to be a commercial agency, and when they found it was just a place for people to talk politics, they left. After a couple of years, the last little group that was left went to the Arts Council to officially form something, which became Autograph, which is still around in a different shape now.
So, how does it feel to see such a major institution now basing a whole show around what was once seen as countercultural?
Well it’s quite ironic, because when we made the work, this institution was the enemy, we never went to it! Tate represented sugar, which represented plantations and slavery, so we never came here. The art world wasn’t interested in photography anyway, and certainly by people of colour… It’s taken them forty years to learn about it and it isn’t quite right, but let’s hope it will be in some future time.
That’s interesting - what would you suggest to improve in future, if that isn’t too controversial a question?
Well, like everything, the politics of this exhibition exist not in that time but in this time… So, in this time, we’re looking at the Black Lives Matter movement and the African diaspora experience, and that’s come to the fore and that’s reflected here. There’s remarkably fewer people of Indian and South Asian heritage, which doesn’t sit with the politics of the 80s. There would have been more equal representation.
Sunil Gupta’s work is featured in The 80s: Photographing Britain, showing at Tate Britain until 5th May 2025.
So, just to start off, could you talk us through the photographs we’re standing in front of?
This set of pictures came about as a commission for the exhibition Reflections of the Black Experience - I believe there were ten of us with ten pictures each - which opened in Brixton Art Gallery in 1986. There were relatively few South Asians in the group; at that point, a lot of us were calling ourselves ‘black’ in a kind of political way, for solidarity. In a postcolonial sense, if you like, it included a lot of people who’d been part of Britain’s colonies beginning with the Irish, it was very inclusive. I thought if there were seven Afro-Caribbeans and three South Asians, there might be an imbalance in the subjects, so I’d better make mine about South Asians, then I took ten ‘issues’ and made a picture of each of them. Also I was coming out of training and had a great interest in becoming a photojournalist, or documentary photographer, but that was not working out with my postcolonial sensibility; it meant photographing people who did not know and publishing them somewhere else.
This first one here is entitled Migrant, and shows somebody waiting at Heathrow with a head covering. I wanted it to be quite simple and readable; it wasn’t strictly speaking documentary - although we were at Heathrow - but the woman in question was an actress. Unfortunately, she later became very famous and became the first Asian person in Eastenders, so she became very recognisable which wasn’t the plan!
In this photo, this is me and my partner. We went to pose in front of My Beautiful Laundrette, which had just opened at the Coronet in Notting Hill. This one is just called Gay, as a way of depicting it, because there was a discussion about My Beautiful Laundrette and multi-racial gay relationships. So each one has a single-word title that is about an issue that affects South Asians in this country, so migration, homosexuality, family lives… There are others that are not here about activism; I had a picture of somebody who worked for the Newham Seven, a lobbying group in East London.
Could you tell us a little more about the titles? The sparse naming almost feels like a response to people being reduced to one facet of their being.
There’s the saying that a picture speaks a thousand words, so we don’t have a lot of text. Of course exhibitions seem to need explanatory text, but I didn’t want to have some big caption underneath.
What was it that made photography such a potent art form for protest in the 1980s?
Oh, I think because for a lot of us, our day job was working for the press as freelancers, so we were very conscious of the reach of the printed press at the time. Of course, more and more television was taking over, but there was definitely a lot of scope to use photography - not just in the press, which was often right-wing-led, but also there was a lot of educational photographic work produced in this country at the time. There were groups like Camera Work in London; for example, we did an LGBT show at Camera Work and a workshop with secondary school children in London. They were given a camera to make a photo-story about what it’s like to come out in school, and we made laminated prints which became a vehicle for letting these pictures travel with a message. That became a staple, where these travelling shows would appear all over the country to talk about aspect - the miner’s strike, or whatever was going on.
That makes sense, considering you’ve credited this photo series [Reflections of the Black Experience] with bringing you into grassroots politics, that it evolved into photography as politics…
Yeah, I made the decision in 1983 after graduating from the RCA, not to go to Cork Street to find a gallery and become an artist, but instead to go across the river to the town hall where I met the GLC and became involved with them. I learned about the party-political activity, that sense of how culture can work for everyone’s advantage in that way. They were willing to finance it and they had space, so they put on shows like Reflections. So I learned about grassroots work, then the Reflections show led to a period of no funding because Margaret Thatcher shut the GLC and took away our main source of funding. But what the show had done was bring a number of photographers of colour together, so we just kept meeting to figure out what could happen next. Over a two-year period, people came and went - I think a number of people misunderstood it to be a commercial agency, and when they found it was just a place for people to talk politics, they left. After a couple of years, the last little group that was left went to the Arts Council to officially form something, which became Autograph, which is still around in a different shape now.
So, how does it feel to see such a major institution now basing a whole show around what was once seen as countercultural?
Well it’s quite ironic, because when we made the work, this institution was the enemy, we never went to it! Tate represented sugar, which represented plantations and slavery, so we never came here. The art world wasn’t interested in photography anyway, and certainly by people of colour… It’s taken them forty years to learn about it and it isn’t quite right, but let’s hope it will be in some future time.
That’s interesting - what would you suggest to improve in future, if that isn’t too controversial a question?
Well, like everything, the politics of this exhibition exist not in that time but in this time… So, in this time, we’re looking at the Black Lives Matter movement and the African diaspora experience, and that’s come to the fore and that’s reflected here. There’s remarkably fewer people of Indian and South Asian heritage, which doesn’t sit with the politics of the 80s. There would have been more equal representation.
Sunil Gupta’s work is featured in The 80s: Photographing Britain, showing at Tate Britain until 5th May 2025.
So, just to start off, could you talk us through the photographs we’re standing in front of?
This set of pictures came about as a commission for the exhibition Reflections of the Black Experience - I believe there were ten of us with ten pictures each - which opened in Brixton Art Gallery in 1986. There were relatively few South Asians in the group; at that point, a lot of us were calling ourselves ‘black’ in a kind of political way, for solidarity. In a postcolonial sense, if you like, it included a lot of people who’d been part of Britain’s colonies beginning with the Irish, it was very inclusive. I thought if there were seven Afro-Caribbeans and three South Asians, there might be an imbalance in the subjects, so I’d better make mine about South Asians, then I took ten ‘issues’ and made a picture of each of them. Also I was coming out of training and had a great interest in becoming a photojournalist, or documentary photographer, but that was not working out with my postcolonial sensibility; it meant photographing people who did not know and publishing them somewhere else.
This first one here is entitled Migrant, and shows somebody waiting at Heathrow with a head covering. I wanted it to be quite simple and readable; it wasn’t strictly speaking documentary - although we were at Heathrow - but the woman in question was an actress. Unfortunately, she later became very famous and became the first Asian person in Eastenders, so she became very recognisable which wasn’t the plan!
In this photo, this is me and my partner. We went to pose in front of My Beautiful Laundrette, which had just opened at the Coronet in Notting Hill. This one is just called Gay, as a way of depicting it, because there was a discussion about My Beautiful Laundrette and multi-racial gay relationships. So each one has a single-word title that is about an issue that affects South Asians in this country, so migration, homosexuality, family lives… There are others that are not here about activism; I had a picture of somebody who worked for the Newham Seven, a lobbying group in East London.
Could you tell us a little more about the titles? The sparse naming almost feels like a response to people being reduced to one facet of their being.
There’s the saying that a picture speaks a thousand words, so we don’t have a lot of text. Of course exhibitions seem to need explanatory text, but I didn’t want to have some big caption underneath.
What was it that made photography such a potent art form for protest in the 1980s?
Oh, I think because for a lot of us, our day job was working for the press as freelancers, so we were very conscious of the reach of the printed press at the time. Of course, more and more television was taking over, but there was definitely a lot of scope to use photography - not just in the press, which was often right-wing-led, but also there was a lot of educational photographic work produced in this country at the time. There were groups like Camera Work in London; for example, we did an LGBT show at Camera Work and a workshop with secondary school children in London. They were given a camera to make a photo-story about what it’s like to come out in school, and we made laminated prints which became a vehicle for letting these pictures travel with a message. That became a staple, where these travelling shows would appear all over the country to talk about aspect - the miner’s strike, or whatever was going on.
That makes sense, considering you’ve credited this photo series [Reflections of the Black Experience] with bringing you into grassroots politics, that it evolved into photography as politics…
Yeah, I made the decision in 1983 after graduating from the RCA, not to go to Cork Street to find a gallery and become an artist, but instead to go across the river to the town hall where I met the GLC and became involved with them. I learned about the party-political activity, that sense of how culture can work for everyone’s advantage in that way. They were willing to finance it and they had space, so they put on shows like Reflections. So I learned about grassroots work, then the Reflections show led to a period of no funding because Margaret Thatcher shut the GLC and took away our main source of funding. But what the show had done was bring a number of photographers of colour together, so we just kept meeting to figure out what could happen next. Over a two-year period, people came and went - I think a number of people misunderstood it to be a commercial agency, and when they found it was just a place for people to talk politics, they left. After a couple of years, the last little group that was left went to the Arts Council to officially form something, which became Autograph, which is still around in a different shape now.
So, how does it feel to see such a major institution now basing a whole show around what was once seen as countercultural?
Well it’s quite ironic, because when we made the work, this institution was the enemy, we never went to it! Tate represented sugar, which represented plantations and slavery, so we never came here. The art world wasn’t interested in photography anyway, and certainly by people of colour… It’s taken them forty years to learn about it and it isn’t quite right, but let’s hope it will be in some future time.
That’s interesting - what would you suggest to improve in future, if that isn’t too controversial a question?
Well, like everything, the politics of this exhibition exist not in that time but in this time… So, in this time, we’re looking at the Black Lives Matter movement and the African diaspora experience, and that’s come to the fore and that’s reflected here. There’s remarkably fewer people of Indian and South Asian heritage, which doesn’t sit with the politics of the 80s. There would have been more equal representation.
Sunil Gupta’s work is featured in The 80s: Photographing Britain, showing at Tate Britain until 5th May 2025.
So, just to start off, could you talk us through the photographs we’re standing in front of?
This set of pictures came about as a commission for the exhibition Reflections of the Black Experience - I believe there were ten of us with ten pictures each - which opened in Brixton Art Gallery in 1986. There were relatively few South Asians in the group; at that point, a lot of us were calling ourselves ‘black’ in a kind of political way, for solidarity. In a postcolonial sense, if you like, it included a lot of people who’d been part of Britain’s colonies beginning with the Irish, it was very inclusive. I thought if there were seven Afro-Caribbeans and three South Asians, there might be an imbalance in the subjects, so I’d better make mine about South Asians, then I took ten ‘issues’ and made a picture of each of them. Also I was coming out of training and had a great interest in becoming a photojournalist, or documentary photographer, but that was not working out with my postcolonial sensibility; it meant photographing people who did not know and publishing them somewhere else.
This first one here is entitled Migrant, and shows somebody waiting at Heathrow with a head covering. I wanted it to be quite simple and readable; it wasn’t strictly speaking documentary - although we were at Heathrow - but the woman in question was an actress. Unfortunately, she later became very famous and became the first Asian person in Eastenders, so she became very recognisable which wasn’t the plan!
In this photo, this is me and my partner. We went to pose in front of My Beautiful Laundrette, which had just opened at the Coronet in Notting Hill. This one is just called Gay, as a way of depicting it, because there was a discussion about My Beautiful Laundrette and multi-racial gay relationships. So each one has a single-word title that is about an issue that affects South Asians in this country, so migration, homosexuality, family lives… There are others that are not here about activism; I had a picture of somebody who worked for the Newham Seven, a lobbying group in East London.
Could you tell us a little more about the titles? The sparse naming almost feels like a response to people being reduced to one facet of their being.
There’s the saying that a picture speaks a thousand words, so we don’t have a lot of text. Of course exhibitions seem to need explanatory text, but I didn’t want to have some big caption underneath.
What was it that made photography such a potent art form for protest in the 1980s?
Oh, I think because for a lot of us, our day job was working for the press as freelancers, so we were very conscious of the reach of the printed press at the time. Of course, more and more television was taking over, but there was definitely a lot of scope to use photography - not just in the press, which was often right-wing-led, but also there was a lot of educational photographic work produced in this country at the time. There were groups like Camera Work in London; for example, we did an LGBT show at Camera Work and a workshop with secondary school children in London. They were given a camera to make a photo-story about what it’s like to come out in school, and we made laminated prints which became a vehicle for letting these pictures travel with a message. That became a staple, where these travelling shows would appear all over the country to talk about aspect - the miner’s strike, or whatever was going on.
That makes sense, considering you’ve credited this photo series [Reflections of the Black Experience] with bringing you into grassroots politics, that it evolved into photography as politics…
Yeah, I made the decision in 1983 after graduating from the RCA, not to go to Cork Street to find a gallery and become an artist, but instead to go across the river to the town hall where I met the GLC and became involved with them. I learned about the party-political activity, that sense of how culture can work for everyone’s advantage in that way. They were willing to finance it and they had space, so they put on shows like Reflections. So I learned about grassroots work, then the Reflections show led to a period of no funding because Margaret Thatcher shut the GLC and took away our main source of funding. But what the show had done was bring a number of photographers of colour together, so we just kept meeting to figure out what could happen next. Over a two-year period, people came and went - I think a number of people misunderstood it to be a commercial agency, and when they found it was just a place for people to talk politics, they left. After a couple of years, the last little group that was left went to the Arts Council to officially form something, which became Autograph, which is still around in a different shape now.
So, how does it feel to see such a major institution now basing a whole show around what was once seen as countercultural?
Well it’s quite ironic, because when we made the work, this institution was the enemy, we never went to it! Tate represented sugar, which represented plantations and slavery, so we never came here. The art world wasn’t interested in photography anyway, and certainly by people of colour… It’s taken them forty years to learn about it and it isn’t quite right, but let’s hope it will be in some future time.
That’s interesting - what would you suggest to improve in future, if that isn’t too controversial a question?
Well, like everything, the politics of this exhibition exist not in that time but in this time… So, in this time, we’re looking at the Black Lives Matter movement and the African diaspora experience, and that’s come to the fore and that’s reflected here. There’s remarkably fewer people of Indian and South Asian heritage, which doesn’t sit with the politics of the 80s. There would have been more equal representation.
Sunil Gupta’s work is featured in The 80s: Photographing Britain, showing at Tate Britain until 5th May 2025.
So, just to start off, could you talk us through the photographs we’re standing in front of?
This set of pictures came about as a commission for the exhibition Reflections of the Black Experience - I believe there were ten of us with ten pictures each - which opened in Brixton Art Gallery in 1986. There were relatively few South Asians in the group; at that point, a lot of us were calling ourselves ‘black’ in a kind of political way, for solidarity. In a postcolonial sense, if you like, it included a lot of people who’d been part of Britain’s colonies beginning with the Irish, it was very inclusive. I thought if there were seven Afro-Caribbeans and three South Asians, there might be an imbalance in the subjects, so I’d better make mine about South Asians, then I took ten ‘issues’ and made a picture of each of them. Also I was coming out of training and had a great interest in becoming a photojournalist, or documentary photographer, but that was not working out with my postcolonial sensibility; it meant photographing people who did not know and publishing them somewhere else.
This first one here is entitled Migrant, and shows somebody waiting at Heathrow with a head covering. I wanted it to be quite simple and readable; it wasn’t strictly speaking documentary - although we were at Heathrow - but the woman in question was an actress. Unfortunately, she later became very famous and became the first Asian person in Eastenders, so she became very recognisable which wasn’t the plan!
In this photo, this is me and my partner. We went to pose in front of My Beautiful Laundrette, which had just opened at the Coronet in Notting Hill. This one is just called Gay, as a way of depicting it, because there was a discussion about My Beautiful Laundrette and multi-racial gay relationships. So each one has a single-word title that is about an issue that affects South Asians in this country, so migration, homosexuality, family lives… There are others that are not here about activism; I had a picture of somebody who worked for the Newham Seven, a lobbying group in East London.
Could you tell us a little more about the titles? The sparse naming almost feels like a response to people being reduced to one facet of their being.
There’s the saying that a picture speaks a thousand words, so we don’t have a lot of text. Of course exhibitions seem to need explanatory text, but I didn’t want to have some big caption underneath.
What was it that made photography such a potent art form for protest in the 1980s?
Oh, I think because for a lot of us, our day job was working for the press as freelancers, so we were very conscious of the reach of the printed press at the time. Of course, more and more television was taking over, but there was definitely a lot of scope to use photography - not just in the press, which was often right-wing-led, but also there was a lot of educational photographic work produced in this country at the time. There were groups like Camera Work in London; for example, we did an LGBT show at Camera Work and a workshop with secondary school children in London. They were given a camera to make a photo-story about what it’s like to come out in school, and we made laminated prints which became a vehicle for letting these pictures travel with a message. That became a staple, where these travelling shows would appear all over the country to talk about aspect - the miner’s strike, or whatever was going on.
That makes sense, considering you’ve credited this photo series [Reflections of the Black Experience] with bringing you into grassroots politics, that it evolved into photography as politics…
Yeah, I made the decision in 1983 after graduating from the RCA, not to go to Cork Street to find a gallery and become an artist, but instead to go across the river to the town hall where I met the GLC and became involved with them. I learned about the party-political activity, that sense of how culture can work for everyone’s advantage in that way. They were willing to finance it and they had space, so they put on shows like Reflections. So I learned about grassroots work, then the Reflections show led to a period of no funding because Margaret Thatcher shut the GLC and took away our main source of funding. But what the show had done was bring a number of photographers of colour together, so we just kept meeting to figure out what could happen next. Over a two-year period, people came and went - I think a number of people misunderstood it to be a commercial agency, and when they found it was just a place for people to talk politics, they left. After a couple of years, the last little group that was left went to the Arts Council to officially form something, which became Autograph, which is still around in a different shape now.
So, how does it feel to see such a major institution now basing a whole show around what was once seen as countercultural?
Well it’s quite ironic, because when we made the work, this institution was the enemy, we never went to it! Tate represented sugar, which represented plantations and slavery, so we never came here. The art world wasn’t interested in photography anyway, and certainly by people of colour… It’s taken them forty years to learn about it and it isn’t quite right, but let’s hope it will be in some future time.
That’s interesting - what would you suggest to improve in future, if that isn’t too controversial a question?
Well, like everything, the politics of this exhibition exist not in that time but in this time… So, in this time, we’re looking at the Black Lives Matter movement and the African diaspora experience, and that’s come to the fore and that’s reflected here. There’s remarkably fewer people of Indian and South Asian heritage, which doesn’t sit with the politics of the 80s. There would have been more equal representation.
Sunil Gupta’s work is featured in The 80s: Photographing Britain, showing at Tate Britain until 5th May 2025.
So, just to start off, could you talk us through the photographs we’re standing in front of?
This set of pictures came about as a commission for the exhibition Reflections of the Black Experience - I believe there were ten of us with ten pictures each - which opened in Brixton Art Gallery in 1986. There were relatively few South Asians in the group; at that point, a lot of us were calling ourselves ‘black’ in a kind of political way, for solidarity. In a postcolonial sense, if you like, it included a lot of people who’d been part of Britain’s colonies beginning with the Irish, it was very inclusive. I thought if there were seven Afro-Caribbeans and three South Asians, there might be an imbalance in the subjects, so I’d better make mine about South Asians, then I took ten ‘issues’ and made a picture of each of them. Also I was coming out of training and had a great interest in becoming a photojournalist, or documentary photographer, but that was not working out with my postcolonial sensibility; it meant photographing people who did not know and publishing them somewhere else.
This first one here is entitled Migrant, and shows somebody waiting at Heathrow with a head covering. I wanted it to be quite simple and readable; it wasn’t strictly speaking documentary - although we were at Heathrow - but the woman in question was an actress. Unfortunately, she later became very famous and became the first Asian person in Eastenders, so she became very recognisable which wasn’t the plan!
In this photo, this is me and my partner. We went to pose in front of My Beautiful Laundrette, which had just opened at the Coronet in Notting Hill. This one is just called Gay, as a way of depicting it, because there was a discussion about My Beautiful Laundrette and multi-racial gay relationships. So each one has a single-word title that is about an issue that affects South Asians in this country, so migration, homosexuality, family lives… There are others that are not here about activism; I had a picture of somebody who worked for the Newham Seven, a lobbying group in East London.
Could you tell us a little more about the titles? The sparse naming almost feels like a response to people being reduced to one facet of their being.
There’s the saying that a picture speaks a thousand words, so we don’t have a lot of text. Of course exhibitions seem to need explanatory text, but I didn’t want to have some big caption underneath.
What was it that made photography such a potent art form for protest in the 1980s?
Oh, I think because for a lot of us, our day job was working for the press as freelancers, so we were very conscious of the reach of the printed press at the time. Of course, more and more television was taking over, but there was definitely a lot of scope to use photography - not just in the press, which was often right-wing-led, but also there was a lot of educational photographic work produced in this country at the time. There were groups like Camera Work in London; for example, we did an LGBT show at Camera Work and a workshop with secondary school children in London. They were given a camera to make a photo-story about what it’s like to come out in school, and we made laminated prints which became a vehicle for letting these pictures travel with a message. That became a staple, where these travelling shows would appear all over the country to talk about aspect - the miner’s strike, or whatever was going on.
That makes sense, considering you’ve credited this photo series [Reflections of the Black Experience] with bringing you into grassroots politics, that it evolved into photography as politics…
Yeah, I made the decision in 1983 after graduating from the RCA, not to go to Cork Street to find a gallery and become an artist, but instead to go across the river to the town hall where I met the GLC and became involved with them. I learned about the party-political activity, that sense of how culture can work for everyone’s advantage in that way. They were willing to finance it and they had space, so they put on shows like Reflections. So I learned about grassroots work, then the Reflections show led to a period of no funding because Margaret Thatcher shut the GLC and took away our main source of funding. But what the show had done was bring a number of photographers of colour together, so we just kept meeting to figure out what could happen next. Over a two-year period, people came and went - I think a number of people misunderstood it to be a commercial agency, and when they found it was just a place for people to talk politics, they left. After a couple of years, the last little group that was left went to the Arts Council to officially form something, which became Autograph, which is still around in a different shape now.
So, how does it feel to see such a major institution now basing a whole show around what was once seen as countercultural?
Well it’s quite ironic, because when we made the work, this institution was the enemy, we never went to it! Tate represented sugar, which represented plantations and slavery, so we never came here. The art world wasn’t interested in photography anyway, and certainly by people of colour… It’s taken them forty years to learn about it and it isn’t quite right, but let’s hope it will be in some future time.
That’s interesting - what would you suggest to improve in future, if that isn’t too controversial a question?
Well, like everything, the politics of this exhibition exist not in that time but in this time… So, in this time, we’re looking at the Black Lives Matter movement and the African diaspora experience, and that’s come to the fore and that’s reflected here. There’s remarkably fewer people of Indian and South Asian heritage, which doesn’t sit with the politics of the 80s. There would have been more equal representation.
Sunil Gupta’s work is featured in The 80s: Photographing Britain, showing at Tate Britain until 5th May 2025.
So, just to start off, could you talk us through the photographs we’re standing in front of?
This set of pictures came about as a commission for the exhibition Reflections of the Black Experience - I believe there were ten of us with ten pictures each - which opened in Brixton Art Gallery in 1986. There were relatively few South Asians in the group; at that point, a lot of us were calling ourselves ‘black’ in a kind of political way, for solidarity. In a postcolonial sense, if you like, it included a lot of people who’d been part of Britain’s colonies beginning with the Irish, it was very inclusive. I thought if there were seven Afro-Caribbeans and three South Asians, there might be an imbalance in the subjects, so I’d better make mine about South Asians, then I took ten ‘issues’ and made a picture of each of them. Also I was coming out of training and had a great interest in becoming a photojournalist, or documentary photographer, but that was not working out with my postcolonial sensibility; it meant photographing people who did not know and publishing them somewhere else.
This first one here is entitled Migrant, and shows somebody waiting at Heathrow with a head covering. I wanted it to be quite simple and readable; it wasn’t strictly speaking documentary - although we were at Heathrow - but the woman in question was an actress. Unfortunately, she later became very famous and became the first Asian person in Eastenders, so she became very recognisable which wasn’t the plan!
In this photo, this is me and my partner. We went to pose in front of My Beautiful Laundrette, which had just opened at the Coronet in Notting Hill. This one is just called Gay, as a way of depicting it, because there was a discussion about My Beautiful Laundrette and multi-racial gay relationships. So each one has a single-word title that is about an issue that affects South Asians in this country, so migration, homosexuality, family lives… There are others that are not here about activism; I had a picture of somebody who worked for the Newham Seven, a lobbying group in East London.
Could you tell us a little more about the titles? The sparse naming almost feels like a response to people being reduced to one facet of their being.
There’s the saying that a picture speaks a thousand words, so we don’t have a lot of text. Of course exhibitions seem to need explanatory text, but I didn’t want to have some big caption underneath.
What was it that made photography such a potent art form for protest in the 1980s?
Oh, I think because for a lot of us, our day job was working for the press as freelancers, so we were very conscious of the reach of the printed press at the time. Of course, more and more television was taking over, but there was definitely a lot of scope to use photography - not just in the press, which was often right-wing-led, but also there was a lot of educational photographic work produced in this country at the time. There were groups like Camera Work in London; for example, we did an LGBT show at Camera Work and a workshop with secondary school children in London. They were given a camera to make a photo-story about what it’s like to come out in school, and we made laminated prints which became a vehicle for letting these pictures travel with a message. That became a staple, where these travelling shows would appear all over the country to talk about aspect - the miner’s strike, or whatever was going on.
That makes sense, considering you’ve credited this photo series [Reflections of the Black Experience] with bringing you into grassroots politics, that it evolved into photography as politics…
Yeah, I made the decision in 1983 after graduating from the RCA, not to go to Cork Street to find a gallery and become an artist, but instead to go across the river to the town hall where I met the GLC and became involved with them. I learned about the party-political activity, that sense of how culture can work for everyone’s advantage in that way. They were willing to finance it and they had space, so they put on shows like Reflections. So I learned about grassroots work, then the Reflections show led to a period of no funding because Margaret Thatcher shut the GLC and took away our main source of funding. But what the show had done was bring a number of photographers of colour together, so we just kept meeting to figure out what could happen next. Over a two-year period, people came and went - I think a number of people misunderstood it to be a commercial agency, and when they found it was just a place for people to talk politics, they left. After a couple of years, the last little group that was left went to the Arts Council to officially form something, which became Autograph, which is still around in a different shape now.
So, how does it feel to see such a major institution now basing a whole show around what was once seen as countercultural?
Well it’s quite ironic, because when we made the work, this institution was the enemy, we never went to it! Tate represented sugar, which represented plantations and slavery, so we never came here. The art world wasn’t interested in photography anyway, and certainly by people of colour… It’s taken them forty years to learn about it and it isn’t quite right, but let’s hope it will be in some future time.
That’s interesting - what would you suggest to improve in future, if that isn’t too controversial a question?
Well, like everything, the politics of this exhibition exist not in that time but in this time… So, in this time, we’re looking at the Black Lives Matter movement and the African diaspora experience, and that’s come to the fore and that’s reflected here. There’s remarkably fewer people of Indian and South Asian heritage, which doesn’t sit with the politics of the 80s. There would have been more equal representation.
Sunil Gupta’s work is featured in The 80s: Photographing Britain, showing at Tate Britain until 5th May 2025.
So, just to start off, could you talk us through the photographs we’re standing in front of?
This set of pictures came about as a commission for the exhibition Reflections of the Black Experience - I believe there were ten of us with ten pictures each - which opened in Brixton Art Gallery in 1986. There were relatively few South Asians in the group; at that point, a lot of us were calling ourselves ‘black’ in a kind of political way, for solidarity. In a postcolonial sense, if you like, it included a lot of people who’d been part of Britain’s colonies beginning with the Irish, it was very inclusive. I thought if there were seven Afro-Caribbeans and three South Asians, there might be an imbalance in the subjects, so I’d better make mine about South Asians, then I took ten ‘issues’ and made a picture of each of them. Also I was coming out of training and had a great interest in becoming a photojournalist, or documentary photographer, but that was not working out with my postcolonial sensibility; it meant photographing people who did not know and publishing them somewhere else.
This first one here is entitled Migrant, and shows somebody waiting at Heathrow with a head covering. I wanted it to be quite simple and readable; it wasn’t strictly speaking documentary - although we were at Heathrow - but the woman in question was an actress. Unfortunately, she later became very famous and became the first Asian person in Eastenders, so she became very recognisable which wasn’t the plan!
In this photo, this is me and my partner. We went to pose in front of My Beautiful Laundrette, which had just opened at the Coronet in Notting Hill. This one is just called Gay, as a way of depicting it, because there was a discussion about My Beautiful Laundrette and multi-racial gay relationships. So each one has a single-word title that is about an issue that affects South Asians in this country, so migration, homosexuality, family lives… There are others that are not here about activism; I had a picture of somebody who worked for the Newham Seven, a lobbying group in East London.
Could you tell us a little more about the titles? The sparse naming almost feels like a response to people being reduced to one facet of their being.
There’s the saying that a picture speaks a thousand words, so we don’t have a lot of text. Of course exhibitions seem to need explanatory text, but I didn’t want to have some big caption underneath.
What was it that made photography such a potent art form for protest in the 1980s?
Oh, I think because for a lot of us, our day job was working for the press as freelancers, so we were very conscious of the reach of the printed press at the time. Of course, more and more television was taking over, but there was definitely a lot of scope to use photography - not just in the press, which was often right-wing-led, but also there was a lot of educational photographic work produced in this country at the time. There were groups like Camera Work in London; for example, we did an LGBT show at Camera Work and a workshop with secondary school children in London. They were given a camera to make a photo-story about what it’s like to come out in school, and we made laminated prints which became a vehicle for letting these pictures travel with a message. That became a staple, where these travelling shows would appear all over the country to talk about aspect - the miner’s strike, or whatever was going on.
That makes sense, considering you’ve credited this photo series [Reflections of the Black Experience] with bringing you into grassroots politics, that it evolved into photography as politics…
Yeah, I made the decision in 1983 after graduating from the RCA, not to go to Cork Street to find a gallery and become an artist, but instead to go across the river to the town hall where I met the GLC and became involved with them. I learned about the party-political activity, that sense of how culture can work for everyone’s advantage in that way. They were willing to finance it and they had space, so they put on shows like Reflections. So I learned about grassroots work, then the Reflections show led to a period of no funding because Margaret Thatcher shut the GLC and took away our main source of funding. But what the show had done was bring a number of photographers of colour together, so we just kept meeting to figure out what could happen next. Over a two-year period, people came and went - I think a number of people misunderstood it to be a commercial agency, and when they found it was just a place for people to talk politics, they left. After a couple of years, the last little group that was left went to the Arts Council to officially form something, which became Autograph, which is still around in a different shape now.
So, how does it feel to see such a major institution now basing a whole show around what was once seen as countercultural?
Well it’s quite ironic, because when we made the work, this institution was the enemy, we never went to it! Tate represented sugar, which represented plantations and slavery, so we never came here. The art world wasn’t interested in photography anyway, and certainly by people of colour… It’s taken them forty years to learn about it and it isn’t quite right, but let’s hope it will be in some future time.
That’s interesting - what would you suggest to improve in future, if that isn’t too controversial a question?
Well, like everything, the politics of this exhibition exist not in that time but in this time… So, in this time, we’re looking at the Black Lives Matter movement and the African diaspora experience, and that’s come to the fore and that’s reflected here. There’s remarkably fewer people of Indian and South Asian heritage, which doesn’t sit with the politics of the 80s. There would have been more equal representation.
Sunil Gupta’s work is featured in The 80s: Photographing Britain, showing at Tate Britain until 5th May 2025.
