Beyond the sea

Sunil Gupta enrolled at the prestigious Royal College of Art in London in the early 1980s. Having access to colour negative printing at the college, the young photographer began to roam the streets of the Big Smoke searching for the epicentres of queer life — Earl’s Court, King’s Road,

Zak Dimitrov moved to London in 2015 and by 2018 he had been on over 100 dates. The man he was going out with at the time, Reggie, turned out to be, as cliche as it sounds, his photographic muse, partially caused by practicalities as he had very little spare time, all of which was spent with Reggie, and he had to take pictures for his final MA project.

With Cinematic Decline — a continuation of Butler's 2019 series and book Odeon Relics — the author traces the remnants of what once were brand-new, purpose-built cinema venues, incongruous with their surroundings back then, and some of them are still so even now. The key point of difference here though, is that none of these buildings continue to screen films, instead they showcase the cinematic afterlife bingo, pubs, churches and dereliction.