Gupta’s lens is as much a psychological tool as an un-blinkered sociological enquirer. The human element and its context are finely knit into a texture that’s as fragile as it’s brutal, provoking both guilty sympathy in middle-class viewers and their horrified recoil. But is Gupta doing what Sontag accuses high art in capitalist countries of? Do his images “reduce moral and sensory queasiness” by inuring the unaccustomed elite eye to the grotesque underbelly of society? Unlike Dorothea Lange and Diane Arbus, whose context was the opulent, conveniently sanitised consumer paradise so cynically critiqued by Warhol, “lowering the threshold of what is terrible” isn’t necessary to immunise the conscience of Indians who grow up with a shrugging familiarity with the shock of the real. This, in Gupta’s case, is the street life of the urban homeless at night in Howrah and Kolkata wherein he combines distress and deviance.

Paradoxically, what is seen day and night is so ubiquitous as to turn invisible, unnoticed. Plucking out images from the urban margins is like highlighting quotations that are noted, read, remembered and referenced. Like quotes, in Gupta’s hands they acquire autonomy and that freezes them into permanence through repetition, refusing to be swept out of sight by political rhetoric. There’s a precarious atmosphere around the images, a volatile charge kept on a leash that seems to be straining to rupture and rip apart the social order.

This visceral tension comes from hints of violence, abuse and sexual attrition, as lives lived on the brink of extremes will, inevitably, grate against legal systems, social order and middle-class niceties.

An old woman’s foreshortened torso disappears under her gnomish head that, shot from above, is gently sculpted with highlights. She wears a smile in which derision and defiance of polite norms blend to reveal a resilience which seems to throw a question at the on-looker, Ah, shocked are you at the way we live? Another old woman, head wrapped, a dirty chador tied in a knot in front, holds a tall, splintered branch and poses like a sentry. A younger woman, on the other hand, seems to cringe inwards, her face crumpling in what could turn into sobs or laughter. Two men embrace with tenderness, a young couple kisses in a somewhat filmi manner, a blind man is hugged from behind by an older man: night-time scenes poised to induce fascination and flinching. If there’s an element of the theatrical, it’s obviously because Gupta isn’t waiting for the decisive moment to leap out to his lens. Rather, he trains its steady gaze on this parallel reality, and lets it overwhelm, even unnerve, the unaccustomed eye.

Rita Datta,
Art Critic,
Kolkata, June 2020

They don’t know the terrors that go through your mind as you lie there in the pit waiting for a hint of light to tell you that the night is over.

– Hubert Selby Jr., The Room (1971)

Angst is my reaction to the trials through which the weak must pass in our society.

This work has its roots in my childhood riddled with severe asthma attacks and in my troubled growing-up years spent trying to come to terms with the world’s expectations. Deep within Angst runs my anger, my frustrations, my hatred for a world in which there is no place for the weak, where weaklings are left to rot.

Nourished by this anger, this hatred, this cynicism, this body of work has grown into a hopeless tale of a fictive night time hellhole, whose nooks and crannies are inhabited by decaying souls. Ultimately, I want Angst to stand as testimony to the requiem of countless dreams, even as it is a record of my angst-ridden youth.

– Soham Gupta, July 2020

Click images for enlargement

Title: Angst Series

Medium: Archival pigment prints (edition 2/4)
Size: 75cm x 50cm (each)  Year: 2013 – 18

Title: Angst Series

Medium: Archival pigment prints (edition 2/4)
Size: 50cm x 75cm (each)  Year: 2013 – 18

Title: The North Sky

Medium: Archival pigment prints (edition 1/12)
Size: 43cm x 28cm (each)  Year: 2020