Indian-Canadian photographer Sunil Gupta was BOTD in 1953. Born in New Delhi, he immigrated to Canada with his family in 1969, settling in Montréal. He studied commerce at Concordia University, where he joined a campus gay liberation movement and began taking photographs for the student newspaper. After graduating, he moved to New York City, where he studied photography at the New School. His 1976 debut exhibition Christopher Street profiled New York’s LGBTQ community in the throes of the sexual liberation movement. He relocated to England in 1978, studying at the West Surrey College of Art and Design and later at the Royal College of Art in London. He rose to public attention with his 1985 collection Exiles, a series of portraits of gay Indian men in front of famous tourist sites, presented alongside quotes from his subjects. Created when homosexuality was still illegal in India, it became a landmark in artistic representations of India’s LGBTQ community. Following the break-up of a relationship, he produced the 1986 portrait series Lovers: Ten Years On, profiling queer British couples in long-term relationships. Gupta’s life and work was profoundly affected by the HIV/AIDS crisis, and his own diagnosis as HIV positive in 1995. His 1995 collection Memorials profiled many of his friends who died of AIDS-related illness, and he explored his diagnosis and subsequent medical treatment in the 1999 collection From Here to Eternity. He returned to portraits of queer couples in Pretended Family Relationships, named in response to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher‘s homophobic Section 28 law prohibiting local authorities and schools from promoting homosexuality as a “pretended family relationship”. In 2004, he returned to live in India, photographing many of his subjects from Exiles for the collection Mr Malhotra’s Party. His 2008 collection The New Pre-Raphaelites, a highly stylised series of portraits of Indian LGBTQ people, was created in response to a legal challenge to the colonial-era laws criminalising homosexuality in India. He also raised eyebrows with his 2010 collection Sun City, a series of sexually explicit stills of men in a gay bathhouse, inspired by the work of Wilhelm von Gloeden and George Platt Lynes. Returning to London in 2012, he revisited many of his subjects from earlier projects, including a 2020 remake of Christopher Street in collaboration with designer Helmut Lang. His most recent project, Songs of Deliverance, was based on a year’s artistic residency at a London hospital, where he photographed patients living with HIV and receiving gender affirmation treatment. Gupta’s work is in the permanent collections of the New York Museum of Modern Art, the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Tate Britain and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. He lives in London with his husband Charan Singh, who is also a photographer.