Inscrutable Photographs: Queering the Normalised Beliefs of Gay Experience, An Analysis of Sunil Gupta’s Exiles
Jay Lim
SGD 17
A5
68 Pages
Published by Quiet Press, 2025
Engaging with Vivian L. Huang’s research on how Asian and Asian American artists have reworked the stereotype of inscrutability, this essay refocuses her findings to inform how we can engage with photographs in a similar way, using Sunil Gupta’s Exiles (1986-7) series as a basis for discussion. Drawing on what Huang describes as a “minoritarian mode” of perception, this essay aims to demonstrate how looking at photographs through a lens of inscrutability can occasion us to sense alternate lived realities and experiences that queer normalised beliefs of gay experience.
"The dominant theories on engagement with photography and queer narratives are often rooted in American and Euro-centric perspectives, which leads to significant gaps when applied to non-Western contexts. I wanted to try and address this gap and explore how photography could be used to communicate, possibly with more success than language, the nuanced gay narratives hidden in plain sight spaces like those in Singapore where there is censorship.
At the time, I could not find any photographic series in Singapore that specifically explored gay narratives which I could base my discussion of Huang’s theory on, so I settled with Sunil Gupta’s Exiles. Even if Gupta himself spent most of his life across Canada, New York, and London, his gay experiences and perspectives being shaped by his time across these places, Gupta’s photographs depicting gay narratives in New Delhi during the peak of the AIDS crisis is still, for me, one of the only photographic representations of queer narratives during this time that shifted focus away from the Western gay world. Exiles reflected a lived reality that many queer Singaporeans and by extension, queer people in the region, still contend with today – threading the fine line, between being visible and simultaneously invisible."
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