Sunil Gupta stands at the forefront of that creative, ?migrant? generation which first exploded on the visual art scene in the UK in the 1980s. Pictures from Here tracks his diasporic journey through a series of intensely lived scenarios and scenes. India, Canada, New York and London provide the mise en scenes of his exploratory practice as photographer, writer, curator, cultural animator and artist. This journey is grounded in the body ? often, his own ? and its vicissitudes. Signalling something more and less than autobiography, the ?here? of his title is as much a position in the frame, a point of arrival in the present, a place of the mind and the visual imagination, as it is an actual destination. The practice has travelled too, from its documentary roots, through digital and computer experimentation to the complex montages and constructed scenes of the later work. Determined from the outset to break the silence surrounding masculinity, male sexuality and desire, what really propels the work is the drama of confronting, through narrative juxtapositions ? between frames and within the frame ? the tensions which have shaped his experience and his practice: between tradition and modernity, being a gay Indian man, educated and living in the West; between public and private, personal and political, the body and the body politic. His courageous address to these issues has given a decisive shape to the contemporary debate about difference.

Stuart Hall, Emeritus Professor, The Open University, and the author of Different: Contemporary Photographers and Black Identity (Phaidon, 2001).