Face Up
Sunil Gupta and Anna Fox both graduated from the Farnham Art School, (now University for the Creative Arts), in the early 1980s, both now occupy significant places in the world of contemporary photography, this in itself has been a challenge within a profession that was, in the West, previously dominated by the 'white male master photographer'.
They started work in the field of documentary inspired by the highly influential 'New Colourists' from the US as well as the more provocative work of American photographers such as Nan Goldin and Larry Clark and British photographers such as Martin Parr and Paul Graham who forged the way with the photographing of the everyday using colour documentary photography in the UK.
The exhibition FACE UP explores the relationship they have both developed to the photograph as portrait, the term 'Face Up' suggests a facing up to truths or a sense of landing upright in the right place. In much of their work Gupta and Fox use a very controlled approach to photographing their subjects, directing them quite specifically in order to explore and extend their radical ideas, revealing aspects of life that normally remain concealed. Both photographers work from the starting point of the personal and the private; their work questions past representations and raises new questions and dilemmas concerned with race, gender and identity.