Christopher Street (1976/2020) is a suite of six editioned prints from Sunil Gupta’s celebratedseries. This special 2020 edition honors Gupta’s 1976 photographs, which captured a specific moment in queer...
Christopher Street (1976/2020) is a suite of six editioned prints from Sunil Gupta’s celebratedseries. This special 2020 edition honors Gupta’s 1976 photographs, which captured a specific moment in queer history, a time of LGBTQ+ liberation, six years after the Stonewall riots of 1969. The un-staged works show a cross section of a thriving community in one of New York’s most dynamic areas, Manhattan’s Christopher Street. Although he uses a documentarian style, Gupta was by no means an impartial observer behind the camera, he was a participant, enthralled by his subjects. His subjects are dressed in the latest fashions, moving confidently and relaxing on street corners, their visible presence is a signifier of a specific period of public consciousness. Now, with hindsight, Gupta is struck by the routineness and openness of the images – a few years later the Aids crisis took hold and this infamous street would be changed forever.