All images from Desi Boys © Soham Gupta

Soham Gupta made his name capturing Kolkata’s unseen poor. Now his mood has softened, and the city’s youth movement has picked up pace

In Kolkata, young men crowd on roadsides, around food stalls, in shops, warehouses and arcades. From the tomb of Wajid Ali Shah – the last Nawab of the northern region of Awadh – in Metiabruz, to the bustle of Park Street and Mullick Bazar, men linger on motorbikes, smoke, laugh and flirt nervelessly, the same as youngsters the world over. One of them, Sahid, looks especially gleeful, his shirt removed to reveal a toned torso and a forearm tattoo sleeve (the word ‘Love’ is just visible). A woman places her ringed fingers on his bare chest, their easy smiles matching. Her eyes are relaxed, looking directly into the camera, while Sahid peers over his muscular right shoulder. His body, her face, are almost luminous against the night sky and worn paintwork of the thick railings behind them.

Sahid is an amateur bodybuilder, we learn from Soham Gupta’s Desi Boys journals. He has just started working in his father’s motorcycle garage in Tollygunge in south Kolkata, but often hangs out at the Safari Park in nearby Rabindra Sarobar – one of countless public areas or monuments named after Rabindranath Tagore in the city. “The girls are always dying to pose with me – and it always gives me a high,” Sahid says. After he has posed for Gupta, Sahid takes him to meet some of his friends nearby, boasting to them that he has just had his picture taken. “The others wanted to have their images made and I was suddenly engulfed in requests, from all sides,” Gupta writes. “And happily, I kept making images.”

These are the Desi Boys – Gupta’s friends, inspiration, subjects. They come from across this city of nearly 15 million, a swelling youth movement comprising both Muslims and Hindus belonging to a range of caste positions, including some Dalits. The idea for the project came about after Gupta was shooting a fashion editorial for New Delhi-based magazine Platform, where he was commissioned by Bharat Sikka. He began noticing what had previously blended into the background. Not just young men wearing fake designer clothing and dyeing their hair, but the way these sartorial choices constituted a new form of expression – the audacity with which they showed off, exchanged ideas, circulated pictures of each other, and saw their choices as distinctly subcultural. “There are different hints of masculinity in different places,” Gupta tells me. “They’re playing many different roles.”

Music is a key part of this new collective identity. Pune-born rapper MC Stan is an important touchpoint for these groups, Gupta says, with his lyrics describing life in – and beyond – India’s working and lower-class communities. The song Basti Ka Hasti is especially popular, its lyrics a combination of tribal hip-hop bravado and pride in a disadvantaged upbringing: “I’m a celebrity in the township!” he barks at one point. “MC Stan is very explicitly talking about the economic divide in India; he is the ultimate symbol for the Great Indian Dream,” Gupta explains. Another rapper crops up in Gupta’s journals, an amateur called MC Cidnapper. “He was not older than 20 – with a lock of golden hair up to his shoulder,” Gupta writes. The boy bounds over to him, excited that he might have his photograph taken and reciting a few lines from a new song about a girl who left him for a richer man.

New India

Desi Boys depicts a globalised India, but not in the way one might associate with tech-hubs, Silicon Valley CEOs and the country’s recent lunar landing, which prime minister Narendra Modi described as “mirror[ing] the aspirations and capabilities of 1.4 billion Indians”. Instead, the globalisation the Desi Boys experience relates mostly to liberalisation, social connectivity and employment – all of which have come about via mass mobile phone uptake in the past decade. In supremely competitive higher education and job markets, the arrival of the gig economy has offered new routes out of unemployment. The criss-crossing journeys these jobs involve add to Desi Boys’ sense of motion – of restlessness in a hyperactive city, of youthful excitement matched by its surroundings. “For many bourgeois and upper-class families, these boys are looked upon as a menace,” Gupta says. That, more than anything else, surely boosts their subcultural credentials.

Desi Boys was made in a specific Indian – and Kolkatan – context. Despite the fake Gucci clothes and Levi’s T-shirts, it is a simplification to assume that globalisation means simply emulating the west. There are other motifs alongside the preference for South Asian hip-hop. Several of Gupta’s encounters happen while searching for the next bowl of steaming biryani, while buildings’ pastel walls, DIY advertising boards and the boys’ sandals and coiffed hairstyles are distinctly Indian. The flash illuminates sections of the graffitied walls behind each of Gupta’s subjects. Exposed pipes and security grills speak to the thousands of vendors who line Kolkata’s daily markets. The youngsters smoke and flex their muscles, gestures whose universality as expressions of young masculinity give them an endearing edge. It is clear that there is a deep affection between artist and subject. “We are like brothers,” Gupta reflects.

The role of religion

But more than any visual cues, it is India’s tense political and religious climate that gives Desi Boys its texture. Led by Modi since 2014, the country’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has proposed a series of legislation which disadvantages India’s Muslim population. Passed in 2019, the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) excluded Muslims from a fast-track for persecuted minorities to attain citizenship, while an accompanying amendment to the National Register of Citizens (NRC) similarly planned to exclude Muslims from an accelerated naturalisation process. Following widespread protests in early 2020, the NRC has yet to be implemented nationwide, with West Bengal among several states not under BJP control saying it will not enact the rulings. Cities with historically Muslim names have been renamed to reflect the BJP’s Hindutva ideology – Allahabad has become Prayagraj; Osmanabad is now officially Dharashiv, for example – and mob intimidation and violence against Muslims has become increasingly normalised.

The Desi Boys belong to both religions, and Kolkata’s political history plays an important part in the social harmony of the project. West Bengal was led by the communist Left Front from 1977 until 2011. “There’s no room for xenophobia in West Bengal – we grew up among too many hammers and sickles,” Gupta says. He recalls a discussion with a young man after he commented on his celebratory dress: “Eid is for the Muslims, but at the same time Eid is for everyone.” Gupta connects this environment to the willingness of the Desi Boys to express themselves, especially with styles that subvert a traditionally conservative culture. “Here, people feel safe to assert themselves, to go out in clothes that they like, to dye their hair. Desi Boys is a response against the xenophobic phase we’re going through,” he says.

Gupta describes Desi Boys’ subjects as “all subaltern in some way”. He draws a link with his 2017 project Angst, in which he made pictures of those at the foot of Kolkata’s social and caste ladders – the homeless and the hopeless. The word ‘subaltern’ resonates deeply in Kolkata, particularly in its adoption by late-20th-century postcolonial theory. Ranajit Guha, Partha Chatterjee and Gayatri Spivak, founding members of the Subaltern Studies group, all attended Kolkata’s Presidency College (the latter two were also born in the city) before developing their ideas abroad. The group applied Antonio Gramsci’s idea of the subaltern to the marginalised populations whose experiences had been omitted from the history of India, especially narratives of how anti-imperial thought had developed into the independence movement. The subaltern is not simply someone who is poor, neglected or part of a system-based underclass. It means that they are excluded from the economic, social and cultural institutions of power within their colonial society, and – as Spivak queries – may also lack the means to articulate their condition if the language and norms of the coloniser have been impressed upon them.

“Desi Boys is a response against the xenophobic phase we’re going through”

Subaltern experiences

How does the subaltern relate to Gupta’s subjects – and his wider project? On the one hand, his photographs are the voice of subaltern experience. The way Gupta makes pictures is collaborative, but not prescriptive. The boys ask for their portraits for their WhatsApp pictures: “Come, take a group photo – of all of us! And you better send them to us! Not just one or two, but the entire set!” they tell him. His portraits perhaps circulate among his subjects more than they do in a western context, in which exploitative power dynamics risk being repeated. The image is networked, not static.

But still there is wariness around the ethics of display, particularly with Angst – the portraits at times shocking, raw and near-theatrical in their depiction of alterity and deprivation. The series was included in the 2019 Venice Biennale, the epitome of western art-world polish. But, as shown by the displacement of street vendors before the recent G20 Summit in New Delhi, the Indian establishment often chooses to look away from its own working classes. In this context, looking at people is recognising that they exist, even if it risks showing them as object not subject. To share images today is to engage with a specific moment in Indian history, to show integration, joy and modernity when openness seems on the wane. It is history without the responsibility of history; a record without the dryness of documentary.

When Gupta first titled Desi Boys, he was cautioned by critics whose advice he paraphrases in the Desi Boys journals. “How can you name it Desi Boys! You’re further marginalising the subaltern by calling this work that!” But Gupta’s photographs can be seen as a subaltern source – as history from below, with photography a new discourse. “Angst was made at a time when I was really emotionally down. It had all my anger in the work for a world that doesn’t care for people who are marginalised,” Gupta says. Desi Boys reflects a mood shift, but a way to invite his subjects into the image-making contract. “I’m more balanced now and it shows in the pictures,” Gupta continues. “They’re a celebration of life – my version of the truth that I am trying to portray.”

“Mixing capitalism and stock markets with the arms trade is one of the worst things that can happen”

In 2020, the estimated value of the global arms trade was $112billion, but the conflicts in Ukraine and Israel-Gaza have bolstered sales; German manufacturer Rheinmetall’s share price more than doubled in the two months following the Russian invasion into Ukraine. The UK’s arms exports doubled during 2022 to a record £8.5billion, with Qatar the biggest buyer. Nothing Personal shows the full breadth of the equipment behind these numbers. Tanks, armoured suits, rifles and intelligence devices are shown in prototype or unused form, with an unnerving sterility which matches the attendees’ tailored suits.

Most of all, Teryoshin is attuned to the ways the industry justifies itself – a combination of wilful ignorance, profit-chasing and close ties to the security architecture of superpowers such as the US, China and India. By holding these narratives alongside the realities of today’s wars, dark ironies emerge. Slogans are a straightforward example: Kalashnikov Concern rebranded in 2014 under the slogan ‘Protecting Peace’; ITT Inc uses the line ‘Engineered for Life’. Nothing Personal is about conveying these ironies, exposing not just these closed fairs, but the implications of a world in which militarisation is incentivised. A huge battlefield-inspired cake at the UAE’s Navdex fair in 2019 is the most absurd example of these juxtapositions, while red carpets, copious wine and ornate bouquets feature across the series.

“For people working there, it doesn’t actually matter what they’re selling,” Teryoshin says. “You can sell vacuum cleaners, cars, killing machines, as long as you maintain the idea that what you’re doing is good because it’s for security, fighting against ‘bad guys’.” An earlier project, Hornless Heritage, saw him go behind the scenes in Germany’s dairy industry, where cows are genomically selected and artificially inseminated. Teryoshin sees similarities with the arms fairs in terms of ethical triangulation – millions of people eat meat despite knowing about the extractive and abusive nature of factory farming, and people continue to develop and sell weapons while civilians and soldiers are killed.

“These ironies are coming not just from my point of view, this world is isolated from the public,” Teryoshin says. “People are living in a parallel universe.” Even so, he picks out the fairs’ banality as perhaps their most sinister quality: “For a weapons trader, the best thing is to sell to both sides of the conflict.”

Nikita Teryoshin, Nothing Personal – The Back Office of War is out now (GOST Books)

I’ve had a deep interest in photobooks since 2006, when I made my first one at university. I was very aware that this was a big part of how I could disseminate my work. I couldn’t – and still can’t – afford to make a traditional commercial photobook. That monetary side of things has influenced my path to evolve the format. I started to question why there is this limited definition of what the photobook can be. Things have to evolve; all art evolves. I had to find some way to make them mine – to imbue them with unique authorship.

I started making my ‘book installations’ in 2013. They were very limited, primitive and unrefined. Since then I’ve been trying to use a more sculptural form. I come from a construction background, and I physicalise the work at a very early stage. Even after the first shoot I might make an initial dummy to bring the images off the screen. My book installations are, in effect, maquettes. As I complete each one, I view them in the same way I would dummies. These dummies – that from traditional interpretation would be deemed the ‘back end’ of a photo project – are the heart and soul of it.

The Abysm is a book of pictures of my father connected to his cancer diagnosis. It depicts a complete mental collapse and breakdown. Those are honourable and truthful depictions. I felt that the single-form photobook couldn’t adequately represent that. I needed to add other dimensions. The idea with the project is to show the images in a complete snowscape – to show the book installation in a cold, algid environment. That is how the experience felt and how it was. I hope that feeding that exterior environment into the narrative of the book will add an element of connection for the viewer. I’m trying to bring the imagery off the page while still keeping the page.

Caligo started as a vertical installation – playing with the dummies and thinking, ‘How could this work?’ It first came from a cardboard form, then there was the idea of a concertina book. I thought, ‘What if the concertina book somehow came off a wall?’ I tested it in Paris – the first proper maquette – and when I submitted it to the Aesthetica Art Prize, they asked whether it could be made horizontal. I didn’t know how to take being asked to change the artwork to fit the space, but I thought it was a good challenge so I made the horizontal version. Another form of Caligo is the fourmetre installation, which challenges the very definition of what a photobook can be.

“I couldn’t – and still can’t – afford to make a traditional commercial photobook. I started to question why there is this limited definition of what the photobook can be.”

For Interstates of Becoming, I spent four years working in the Indian Himalayas. I travelled along NH5, a road along the border with Tibet, which is one of the most dangerous roads in India. It was terrifying. It was originally a trunk road built by the British to syphon trade away from Kashmir. Today it’s a very important route for the hydroelectric industry and for the Indian military, because it services the border region with China. The mountain is continually eroding, with landslides every other day. There is also the creation of man-made concrete structures to try to counter this. It’s a continuing cycle of construction and destruction. I am currently creating a photobook installation that depicts the direct and indirect effects humans and mountains have on each other. When the series was shown as NH5, I included a wall that was leaning against the viewer like a landslide – a billboard you would walk under. I wanted to bring across all the elements I experienced on this road to the installation.

As global temperatures rise, glaciers melt and water flows increase. Excess water creates more precipitation that, in turn, falls heavily within the Himalayas. Concrete, metal and tarmac act as the facade of human preservation. The peril is amplified by the ‘developed world’’s ignorance to the effects of imperial and capitalist industrialisation, but human endeavour doesn’t stop. It’s an ongoing contest for survival that binds humans with the mountains. I like to think there’s a harmony within this tussle for dominance; that’s what I’m trying to depict in these photographs.

It’s liberating to remove the ‘documentary photography’ title. I always felt that was too limiting. The fallacy of truth that is connected to it restricted me. Being so immersed in documentary photography as my starting form, I later considered whether I could use different materials to show the truth I’m trying to convey. To show the strength of what I’m trying to convey. The narrative is honest.

© Emmaline Zanelli. OpenWalls Arles Single image winner

50 single image winners and two series will be shown together at Galerie Huit Arles, all responding to theme of Truth

At a time when the idea of truth is unstable, responses to it are more intriguing and varied than ever before, taking a perilously fluid concept as their starting point. By choosing ‘truth’ as the theme of OpenWalls Arles vol. 4, BJP sought to sample the breadth of photographic interpretations of truth – encouraging projects on self-actualisation, political realities, historic storytelling and family closeness.

For the fourth edition of the award, 50 single image winners have been selected, including photographs by Anna Sellen, Dave Shrimpton, Ralph Whitehead, and climate-focused images by Guillaume Flandre, Laura Roth, Frederike Kijftenbelt and Savas Onur Sen, while Carlos Idun-Tawiah’s Sunday Special and Krista Svalbonas’ What Remains are awarded the two series prizes. The winners, whose works will be shown this summer at Galerie Huit Arles, were selected by judges Julia de Bierre, Mutsuko Ota, Sarah Leen, Paris Chong, Michael Famighetti, Azu Nwagbogu and Matt Alagiah.

My goal is not to uncover a single objective truth, but rather to explore the many subjective layers of a truth that are personal and relevant to the persons I am photographing

– Julia Gunther – OpenWalls Arles Single Image Winner

The prompt for this year’s theme was French photographer Jacques-Henri Lartigue’s line that photography is “catching a moment which is passing, and which is true.” The aim of OpenWalls 2023 is to challenge Lartigue’s notion in a modern context – to not only interrogate the idea of truth in a post-truth age, but to insist upon photographic authority as collaborative, considering multiple truths from across the six continents from which the winning images are taken.

“My goal is not to uncover a single objective truth, but rather to explore the many subjective layers of a truth that are personal and relevant to the persons I am photographing,” says Julia Gunther, whose winning image is a portrait of Eunice, a deaf tailor from Southern Malawi. Two truths coexist in the image, Gunther explains. One is the reality that Eunice struggles to be heard in her home country owing to a lack of audiologists and sign language translators. The second is Eunice’s self-conception – “a strong, beautiful woman with a long tailoring career ahead of her,” Gunther explains. In this and many of the 50 winning images, intrinsic truth trumps outside perception. 

Identity is a dominant theme across the 50 photographs, illustrating the ways that truth corresponds to living authentically. Jesse Glazzard’s series Testo Diary allowed the artist to document incremental shifts in their physicality and personhood as they transitioned. “I took control and began a new process of consciously photographing the tiny changes in my face and body as the weeks went on,” they say. “I came to appreciate that in charting these changes, I was not fixing the image of my body in time, but instead showing its capacity to shift.” Heather Agyepong’s Too Many Blackamoors (#4) uses concealed portraiture to challenge the expectations Black women face, while in My Papa Told Me, Chidinma Nnorom incorporates a self-portrait into an old family picture featuring her father, engaging with “the dynamism of authenticity through the sociocultural concept of family and community.”

Family albums also inspired Carlos Idun-Tawiah’s winning series Sunday Special, which the artist describes as a “requiem of my memories.” Across choreographed retellings of preaching, domestic relaxation and university graduation, Idun-Tawiah attempts to “highlight the ethos of Sundays from a much more vernacular perspective, paying visual nostalgia, juxtapositions, colour and gesture to fully extract the roundedness of the traditions of what Sundays typically felt like in Ghana.” Photography is used to depict real events, but also push imaginative boundaries, blending ideas of community and divinity to stretch ideas of truth into celebratory and utopic territory.

Several of the winning entries tackle the war in Ukraine – new realities for displaced Ukrainians, unknown truths relating to warfare, and the importance of preserving authentic culture when forced erasure is a constant. Frankie Mills captures Artem, a boy from Ukraine, as he teeters on the edge of a swimming pool in his sponsor’s home in Ivybridge, Devon. The Homes for Ukraine scheme brought the 8-year-old to the south west of England, though his relationship with his adopted home remains tentative and undefined – a future truth yet to be realised while one burns in the past. In The Unknown Truth of Injury, Julian Simmonds depicts Nikita, who was injured while serving with the Ukrainian Armed Forces during the Kharkiv counteroffensive in September 2022. He doesn’t know the true origins of his injury – an example of consequence without cause, and the way war robs people of their subjectivity.

Marcel Top’s Staged Facts, Ukraine 0036 addresses the war while also tackling a significant concern in the world of photography – the applications and ethics of artificial intelligence. Top uses Arma 3 software to create near-authentic constructions of conflict zones using real photographic content shared online. He uses 3D models of uniforms, weapons and vehicles to accurately depict the war’s material building blocks. As well as highlight the brutality – and imagined reality – of war, he hopes to raise awareness about the role of computer-created imagery in spreading misinformation during times of conflict. Güzin Mut takes a playful approach towards photography’s grappling with technology in his winning image. The Berlin-based artist was on assignment for a travel agency in Tünektepe, Türkiye, when he came across the photo shop against a stunning mountainous backdrop. “The wordplay was not lost on me,” she says wryly.

Krista Svalbonas’s winning series What Remains is a fitting testament to how the theme can be applied to ideas of history, belonging and healing – while also pushing material boundaries. Her photographs depict Soviet-era towers and industrial buildings in the Balkans where families like her parents’ lived. As a Latvian-Lithuanian artist based in the US, Svalbonas is concerned with ideas of cultural preservation, incorporating traditional Baltic textile designs around the architectural photographs, a commentary on the erasure of Baltic culture under the Soviet Union. “My connection to this history has made me acutely aware of the impact of politics on architecture and, in turn, on a people’s daily lived experience,” she says. “This work examines the ways in which people are shaped by their environment, and how they can rebel against it to preserve their identity and culture.” 

Ultimately, the winning image of this edition of OpenWalls projects demonstrate that truth can be wielded to empower an endless range of human impulses, whether preservation, rebellion, remembrance or imagination. Truth’s flexibility might be the most valuable legacy of the supposedly post-truth age.

OpenWalls Arles vol. 4 is at Galerie Huit Arles from 5 July to 26 September

With special thanks to our partner:

© Anthony Luvera.

In this month’s editor’s picks, we take another look at Craig Easton’s decades-long portrait of the Williams – a family let down by the systemic failure of successive governments’ social policies. We also re-visit BJP‘s top photo book picks for this season, and step inside Trevor Paglen’s studio.

Finally, we explore the little-known colour images of Magnum’s Werner Bischof and, in a piece from the latest issue of BJP, ask if socially engaged photographers should pay their participants.

In the studio with Trevor Paglen

Fair exchange: should socially engaged photographers pay their participants?

© Tatenda Chidora.

In this month’s editor’s picks, we meet Andrea Gjestvang’s atlantic cowboys – the Faroese men increasingly living without women. We explore an Italian city newly freed form the grip of the Mafia, and enjoy an audience with Magnum’s Cristina de Middel.

We also discover a photographer’s guide to Japan’s capital city, and hear from the winners of the Environment category at this year’s Sony World Photography Awards.

On Location: A photographer’s guide to Kyoto

Married to the landscape’: Photographing the Faroe Islands, where men outnumber women

© Tatenda Chidora.

In this month’s editor’s picks, Isabelle Wenzel explores the universal experience of inhabiting a body, while Morgan Ashcom presents corrupted film as a metaphor for oppression. We also revisit the work of the late documentary photographer Mik Critchlow, and celebrate the winner’s of BJP’s own Portrait of Humanity award

‘Open in a dark room only’: salvaged images of Palestinian resistance

Isabelle Wenzel celebrates the powerful potential of the body