‘Where are you’: Photographer Ritesh Uttamchandani captures menace, melancholia in Manchester
As a South Asian trying to take photographs of Britons in public space, he finds himself almost involuntarily drawn into a reverse anthropology.
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This square red book, its brightness tamped down by a matt finish, asks its reader, “Where are you”. The missing question mark leaves the sentence open-ended, an existential inquiry rather than a factual one. We look inside the book and realise the query was probably shot out on a cellphone, the question mark displaced by a hurried “Send”. The first page reads: “Out and about yet?”
Bombay-based photographer Ritesh Uttamchandani spent a few months last year in Manchester with his partner, who works as a doctor there. He explored the city as a stranger, trying to keep under the radar, tentative and inconspicuous. The images are mostly taken from a distance, out of respect for people’s privacy.
But equally, we could surmise that this lack of proximity emanates from a non-white photographer’s caution, his fear of agitating a British temperament whose insularity has been exacerbated by Brexit. Uttamchandani’s photographs, which are interspersed with discreet notes, offer us a glimpse into an imploded nation that, having lost its empire, is visiting its violent reflexes on itself.
On the train, he hears a little boy called Tyler talking of his “other mom”, his father having beaten his birth-mother to death in a drunken rage. The photograph...
