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 that accompanies this note does not illustrate what transpired on the train. But, a few pages later, while we are still thinking of Tyler’s young mother, snatched from him, we come upon another form of theft.
When Uttamchandani’s loaf of bread is stolen from his doorstep, a friend volunteers an observation about the city: “Janaab, is sheher mein, they’ll steal sugar from your chai and you won’t come to know.” The accompanying photograph shows the sign “Coffee” emblazoned on a drab grey wall. Deadly pigeon spikes, fixed to the letters, keep them shining white.
The South Asian friend’s cautionary tale of chai and chini, coupled with the sign, brings back to mind the twin horrors of colonialism and slavery. British novelists writing in the high noon of Empire, between the late 18th and late 19th centuries, made blithe reference – almost in passing – to Australia, India or the Caribbean.
Their stories revolved around the civilities and pleasantries of English life, sketching an elaborate comedy of manners or rejoicing in the restoration of justice for the right class of person. The luxury of the leisurely English afternoon tea was maintained by the invisible labour of slaves and peasants toiling on faraway plantations, politely erased from the narrative.
Urging us to reconsider such literary whitewashing in Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said writes: “To read Austen without also reading Fanon and Cabral… is to disaffiliate modern culture from its engagements and attachments. That is a process that should be reversed.”
On the evidence of his Manchester photographs, Uttamchandani finds himself almost involuntarily drawn into a reverse anthropology. He is a South Asian trying to take photographs of Britons in public space – and discovers that this is a project fraught with risk.
A white photographer can, even today, regard it as his birthright to visit the former colonies and shoot everything in sight, often framing his images as poverty porn. By contrast, the South Asian photographer does not have the same right to shoot strangers in the former imperial centre. He is rebuffed with a middle finger or an exposed backside.
A walk to the supermarket ends in a confrontation with street thugs – and a photograph of shattered glass on asphalt, evidence of the bottle thrown at him, narrowly missing its target. Many of the photographs in Where are you reveal the menace and violence that form a substratum of social life in Manchester.
Here is a photographer who has initiated a project without the safety net of institutional funding, local contacts and helpful interlocutors. He is not working from a readymade research agenda about British colonial domination, not taking the route recommended by experts on late 19th- and early 20th-century Manchester’s textile export trade, which broke the Indian weaving industry. Instead, he walks Manchester’s streets with abundant curiosity, feeling exposed, a little fearful, but always desiring human contact.
Where are you begins on a poetic note: a lone swan floating on the surface of a lake with its neck bent and its head underwater. What does the photographer seek – divinatory magic, grace, beauty, wisdom? The swan in English or the hamsa in Sanskrit, the trembling soul seeking transcendence? Or is the swan an alter ego of the photographer nourishing himself with new sensations?
Uttamchandani has an unerring eye for the telling detail. A solitary woman stands hunched over her bags. It seems as if she is stuck to the pavement forever. There’s nobody to give her a hand except ironically for the nearby sign, which claims to be “Building Society”.
A few pages later, a composition of forklifts against a very blue sky promises action. But we can’t be sure if these machines bearing the name “Genie Quick” are harbingers of good or evil.
While a number of the images in Where are you are framed from the perspective of a vulnerable postcolonial subject trying to make sense of unpredictable violence, the book ends with images of tender love and care: a couple lost in their dance on the waterfront, a pup rubbing its moist nose on an ailing woman’s face, a squirrel perched on the knee of a solitary man sitting in a park, waiting to be fed.
This is Uttamchandani’s second book. He also self-published his first one in 2018, under the fairytale title, The Red Cat and Other Stories. That book bore witness to his love of his home city, Bombay, and its people in all their everyday eccentricity, costumed in bleak experience and runaway fantasy.
In The Red Cat, Uttamchandani cites Abraham Maslow to emphasise the importance of finding “the sacred in the ordinary… in one’s neighbours, friends and family, in one’s own backyard. This lesson can be easily lost.”
The same spirit asserts itself during his walks through Manchester, saving him from clinging to his outsiderness. He picks up on menace and melancholia, but he is also sensitive to the loneliness of others, recognising their marionette status in a system that alienates and diminishes them.
He never renounces his empathy for all that breathes – bipedal, furry or winged – and his conviction that, no matter how seemingly insignificant their place in the scheme of things, their lives have value and sanctity.
The last image in the book is especially mysterious: a lone woman sitting with her back to us, on a cold, dreary day. As if to warm herself, she holds her gloved hands together. But not quite. She is holding only a glove. Is she trying to connect the socially approved half of herself with a more elusive, transgressive, missing half? Or is she waiting for a difficult love to return and fill the empty glove with its presence?
Nancy Adajania is a cultural theorist, art critic and independent curator.
Where are you, Ritesh Uttamchandani, Guerrilla Archivist.
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