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On his website Sunil Gupta writes of this self-portrait based series: "I was asked to make an artist's page for POZ magazine in 2004 for their December issue. POZ is a New York published magazine for people who are HIV Positive. This became an ongoing project where I was charting a course of my emotional life. Since the initial impetus for doing this work has now passed the project came to a natural end. A version of this was an audio visual projection that was first screened in Arles 2007 and then in Delhi in January 2008."

In Poz Gupta writes that "Love & Light is the starting point of a new series about love. It follows my 'Homelands' series of landscapes of the home of an infected person (me)—and explores the landscape of love for someone who is positive (again me). The accompanying text elaborates on this: "Sunil Gupta has spent most of his adult life hopscotching between India (where he was born), Montreal (where he moved with his family as a teenager) and New York City and London (where he studied). But India is most on his mind lately. "The attitudes there toward HIV are terrible," says the 51-year-old photographer. "The consequences for most people who are diagnosed as positive remain pretty grim." That's why Gupta, who tested positive in 1995, recently showed his work in his homeland. "I received quite a large and varied response," he says. "All in all, I feel I can be more useful there than sitting here in London." It's no wonder Gupta's photographs had people talking. His work fearlessly explores his identity as a gay HIV positive Indian... When he tested positive, Gupta remembers thinking, No, I don't want to be an HIV positive artist. Yet the news also reminded him that life was precious and "I should use it to make work." Which may account for the way in which HIV is both present and buried in his photographs. Wherever Gupta goes in his autobiographical art, so goes his HIV - this lyrical piece for POZ is the beginning of a new series exploring his first relationship with an (HIV negative) Indian man. (A serodiscordant gay Indian love story is something "we have few images of," Gupta says.) But his experiences - the blurry intoxication of romance, the crisp focus of solitude remain universal."

In 2007 Gupta elaborated on the autobiographical aspect of this series: “I returned to India in the summer of 2005. A move precipitated by meeting and falling in love with an Indian man in Delhi. An event I recorded with the first of a series of diptychs called Love & Light. In the photograph I tried to encapsulate the emotional intensity between us as well as the intensity of the location, a Buddhist monastery in Ladakh. My photography has become intrinsically bound up with my life and sometimes it’s hard to see where the boundaries lie. I met the man during my first major solo show in Delhi in 2004. There had been an overwhelming response and, I suppose, I emotionally opened up to the place for the first time after a thirty-seven year absence in the West. Something I didn’t realise was happening at the time, so I was caught off guard. It had been a long time, nine years, since I had been diagnosed HIV Positive and my last lover had left for good. It was a surprise to me that it was still possible to find love...

The picture was made as an artist’s page for the New York based Poz magazine for HIV+ people. People have since written to me that they too found it inspirational. AIDS rhetoric is so bound up with medical jargon and sociological studies that people forget about love. Soon after I turned fifty I found myself making a short interview video with the British scholar, Stuart Hall. The University of the West Indies was honouring him. Naturally we talked about being people of the Diaspora and the pull our places of origin had on us. Sooner or later most of us wonder if we will ever go “home”. Or whether home is in our adopted lands. Hall had struggled with the same questions. He advised that if I was so inclined and seeing that I had reached middle age, I should make the return journey now so that I could play an active role once I got back. It was the little encouragement I needed to get back to Delhi. Later might be too late for me. I could see that I certainly wouldn’t want to come back as a retired person and be cut off from my working life and friends entirely. I belong to a family of economic migrants. I found myself in New York in the mid-seventies enrolled in an MBA programme, however I stopped attending the classes and enrolled in a class with Lisette Model. Modern photography had arrived by 1976. She said, I think you had better give up business school and take up photography. My first critical mentor; I decided to be a little bold and took her advice, not knowing quite how I would survive. What happened in between these two life-changing encounters and subsequently is what I am presenting here....

The Indian lover is no more, but instead I have become wedded to the place. In 2004, Radhika Singh, Director of the agency Fotomedia in New Delhi, chose works by me for the show in Delhi, entitled Exiles, Trespass, From Here to Eternity and Homelands. Now I’m following on with series called Country and Love & Light, which are simply about my relationship to this place called India; its geography, history, spirituality and the love it has to offer.”