Delhi offers a stunning series of more than 150 full-color documentary photographs and companion first-person texts, which together offer an unprecedented portrait of LGBTQ people’s lives in India today. Focusing on the capital city of Delhi, noted photographers Sunil Gupta and Charan Singh chronicle the halting emergence of networks of men and women living under the shadow of stigma and criminalized behaviorin a country where anti-sodomy laws dating back to the British Empire were recently struck down, only to be reaffirmed in a surging wave of homophobia.
The photographs in this lavishly presented volume reflect the photographers’ celebrated capacity for entering into lives rarely seen (The New Yorker recently noted Gupta’s ability to give his images a subtle erotic charge and a genuine tenderness”). In Delhi, we are invited into the daily routines, work, homes, and intimate lives of subjects from different backgrounds and in different corners of one of the world’s largest, most complicated, and most fascinating urban centers. A visually arresting document in its own right, Delhi will also present American readers a starting point for understanding the profound struggles for recognition by India’s LGBTQ community.
