In an exclusive interview with Homegrown, photographer Soham Gupta reflects on his photoseries ‘Desi Boys’, Kolkata’s street culture, fashion, documentary photography, artistic controversy, and the complicated ethics of representing marginalised communities.
Soham Gupta is best described as a provocateur. Like Tyler Shields and Tatsuo Suzuki, Gupta’s photographs of Kolkata’s street culture exist at the porous intersection of street and documentary photography, contemporary art, autobiography, and literature. His images refuse the detached objectivity traditionally associated with documentary work, and occupy the emotionally charged space where intimacy, performance, vulnerability, and fiction often coexist.
Gupta first gained international recognition with ‘Angst’ (2018), an unflinching exploration of loneliness, trauma, addiction, and mental illness that established him as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary photography. The work earned widespread acclaim, including selection as one of the British Journal of Photography’s Ones to Watch and shortlisting for the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation First Photobook Award and the Photo-Text Book Award at Les Rencontres d’Arles. Since then, his work has been exhibited internationally, from the Venice Biennale and Museum Folkwang to Maison de la Photographie Robert Doisneau in Paris.
His new body of work, ‘Desi Boys’, marks a striking departure. Instead of isolation and despair, Gupta turns his attention to Kolkata’s working-class youth and the exuberant worlds they build through fashion, friendship, bodybuilding, tattoos, motorcycles, and hip-hop. Accompanied by diaristic journal entries that are as revealing about the photographer as they are about his subjects, ‘Desi Boys’ is both a portrait of a generation negotiating class and aspiration and a meditation on the complicated ethics of making images.
In this conversation with Homegrown, Gupta reflects on photography, performance, criticism, and why, despite everything, Kolkata remains his muse — the city he cannot leave behind.
You describe the street as both a studio and a stage — a place where people perform versions of themselves for your camera. What happens in that encounter between photographer and subject? How much of a Soham Gupta photograph is documentation, and how much is collaboration, performance, or fiction?
I am not sure if there’s a ‘Soham Gupta photograph’ at all — maybe it is an emotion — a certain kind of feeling that all the works collectively express. My photographs and words are perhaps notes in a symphony. Or at least I’d like to think of them like this.
I don’t know how to put in words what happens during the making of the images: a lot of craziness, usually. Momentarily, we all transform into someone else. As if no pain, no disadvantages, no privilege, no barriers existed, ever.
Your work gravitates towards people living at the margins of the city, but ‘Desi Boys’ is noticeably different from the darkness and isolation of ‘Angst’ and ‘Eden’; there is swagger, humour, desire, fashion, friendship, and aspiration. Elements like counterfeit designer clothes, bodybuilding, coloured hair, tattoos, motorcycles, and hip-hop appear throughout the work. While these are surface aesthetic choices, they also function as ways of claiming visibility and constructing a self within a society where class determines so much of how one is seen. What have these young people taught you about style as a form of agency? Did making ‘Desi Boys’ change how you understand the people you photograph or what you seek in photography itself?
'Angst' or 'Eden' did not happen out of the blue. I had been working on mental illness and shared trauma since 2006-07. Desi Boys is completely different. It was done during a phase when I was seeking new friends, when I wanted to experience the joy of youth that I couldn’t, as a youngster.
Style, yes, is a form of agency, especially in a country growing more and more intolerant, rigid, casteist or xenophobic.
When I first shared this work with a friend of mine, that person suddenly used a derogatory Hindi slang term used to describe flashiness, non-conformist fashion, and marginalised youth, and asked why I was investing my time in them. I was stunned and scandalised, as the word has deep roots in a historically marginalised caste community, making its carefree use today highly problematic. At the same time, I firmly believe that political correctness is a flaw, a form of hypocrisy, especially as we tend to become woke all of a sudden these days. But some lines should not be crossed, perhaps — and ignorantly making casteist remarks is not cool.
Now, coming back to your question about the young people finding an outlet and a voice in style and fashion: it’s wonderful, isn’t it? Attempting to find visibility in a very problematic society like ours takes guts. But the young people from the innards of Calcutta presenting themselves in their own unique way — it is beautiful. And it’s universal — in Europe, I have seen young people waiting in long queues for haircuts — the one thing common — in India or elsewhere — is a history of exploitation and colonialism, vast income disparity, and suppression. Society is like a pressure cooker; fashion and subculture are the hiss of the steam building inside.
The journal entries accompanying ‘Desi Boys’ are unusually self-aware and self-implicating. Besides the lives of your subjects, you also write about your own loneliness, anxieties, prejudices, class position, failures, and contradictions. Why was it important for you to remain visible within the work instead of assuming the conventional role of an invisible documentarian?
I am a bit dumb, I guess.
That’s always been the case.
I think less and do things instinctively.
Kolkata is central to your work, yet you often remove your subjects from easily identifiable surroundings. Conversely, your journals are extraordinarily attentive to the city and its restaurants, neighbourhoods, class divisions, gentrification, and changing streets. How has your relationship with the city evolved over the years you have photographed it?
About the images lacking context while the journals are full of them — I think it’s my way of managing a balancing act.
My relationship with Calcutta is strange. The city is my muse. I have a love-hate relationship with it. No matter how suffocating it may well be, I know I won’t be content elsewhere.
There is a tension in your work between tenderness and exploitation, particularly because the extractive nature of street and documentary photography inevitably involves differences in access, mobility, and power between photographer and subject. After more than a decade of working through intimate encounters with strangers, how do you navigate the ethics of looking at, photographing, and publicly exhibiting someone else’s life?
I am the poster child of unethical photography in India. I have been cancelled, I have been humiliated, friends have left me, people have backstabbed me, I’ve had a fall, I have been trolled, and because of all this, my health has deteriorated. They were all so content and happy with me when I was a promising young photographer — the moment my images were shown prominently at the 2019 Venice Biennale, they couldn’t take it anymore. People used my images to preach how much of a bad-boy I was. It’s laughable. Is it not exploitation, then, to use my images to prove their point?
But you know, I giggle a bit these days when one talks about ethics! What ethics? Every photographer is a predator. We’re all predators here. If I photograph with a large-format camera, am I not a predator? Every one of us is a predator — the photographer, the one looking, the one criticising while shifting ass on a cushioned chair and pretending to be a moral compass. I am privileged too, irrespective of whether I am close to people who are marginalised or whether I haven’t studied beyond high school.
But the critic who is passing judgment? Aren’t they more privileged?
We are all human; we have to be human — and we must accept our shortcomings. No one is perfect.
Noah Becker wrote sometime back, “The art world loves to talk about freedom while operating like a cartel. It calls itself an ecosystem, but it behaves like a closed loop. The same names circulate, the same ideas get recycled, the same faces nod in agreement at different dinners.”
Everything is fine as long as the pot-bellied Bengali is being made fun of. Things change when they get slightly closer to the photo-mafia (even if temporarily).
Follow @sohamgpt on Instagram.
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