William Gedney’s photographs of India capture the public intimacy between men in the city of Benares, or Varanasi.

This work is now being shown for the first time in India at the Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation gallery in Mumbai.

Devika Singh, a co-curator of the exhibition, told Dan Damon that, while Gedney was not openly gay for much of his career, he was able to capture the male form like few others.

(Picture: Benares, India, 1979, Bathers by the Ganges, courtesy of the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University)