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Postcards from the edge WISH YOU WERE HERE: MEMORIES OF A GAY LIFE (Yoda Press, Rs 995 by Sunil Gupta is dedicated to the memory of a “gentle Brazilian”, Paolo Sergio de Castro, who died in his mid-forties of “complications related to AIDS” in 2006. Top right is part of the “Body Positive” series of photographs that Gupta made with Paolo in London in 2004. It embodies the intertwining of the intimate and the political that informs this book of photographs “of a life lived”: “These are my postcards of the people and places that mattered to me and who shaped my experience.” There are photographs here from the family albums, and those made by Gupta of family, friends, lovers and colleagues, interspersed with a few images that recall the “exhibition work” for which Gupta is publicly known as a photographer. What unfolds is a “set of stories... about place,sex, bodies, politics, movements, families, desires, illness, fear, and migration”. “It is a telling commentary,” the series editor, Gautam Bhan, continues in his introductory piece, “on the contemporary politics of sexuality. Perhaps more importantly, it is an exploration of the possibilities that lie within thinking, imagining and theorising about sexuality.” Left is captioned, “Coming out as a gay teenager in Montreal, 1970”. Bottom right is a photograph made in 2006 of Gupta’s mother, Penny, “at rest” in London. Even as one recognizes the political importance of such a book in India today, one is left wondering about the extent to which it can claim to have created “a new visual vocabulary”. The iconography of an essentially North American, and rapidly globalizing, “gayness” is now more than three decades old. Much of this book will fit seamlessly into this familiar visual culture of a certain kind of urban modernity. Besides, does courageous sexual politics necessarily make epochal photography?