Manchester by the Lens

Last year, when Ritesh Uttamchandani was in Manchester in England, he began putting together pictures he had been taking, of individuals looking straight at him, into a PDF document. He had travelled there to live with his partner – who had moved from Mumbai to work as a doctor in a hospital – for a few months. He had an idea of a photobook at this stage using pictures like these – of individuals in the city, and in some cases, landscapes, staring right back at him.

“It was utterly pretentious,” Uttamchandani says today. “If you point a camera at someone, of course they are going to look right back at you.”

He was still struggling with it, when one Sunday morning, as he sat with his partner for reakfast, listening to the news of the UK government’s plan to have immigrants who had illegally entered the country sent to Rwanda, he saw outside, at the waterside destination known as Quayside, a woman dancing. She was probably a social media influencer creating an Instagram reel of her dance. Instinctively, Uttamchandani reached for his phone and made a video of this performance. When he played it back, the visual of the dancing woman accompanied with the sound of the news discussion, provided such a strange and jarring effect, he realised what shape his project must take. He needed to make the pictures he was shooting a lot more personal. ‘I realised I couldn’t be disconnected,’ he says. ‘It had to have a personal view.’

So every morning, once his partner had left for a long day at work, Uttamchandani would set forth too, carrying a camera, and wandering the city for hours on foot. The result of these wanderings are Uttamchandani’s new photobook  Where are you. Within its pages, in images that evoke tenderness, and sometimes menace, accompanied by short notes that provide us brief but illuminating glimpses into the city, and sometimes his own feelings, Uttamchandani depicts Manchester in a very personalised way. This aspect of personalisation is crucial.

Because this isn’t just a collection of pictures of an English city. It is a collection of pictures of an English city taken by an Indian photographer. Uttamchandani takes pictures of the city, and the city responds back to him.

On many occasions, these responses were hostile and unwelcoming. An outsider – an Indian – walking about, taking pictures wasn’t always welcome. “I would often be mistaken for a cop. They would want to know – demand to know – what I was doing, why was I taking pictures,” Uttamchandani says. In the pictures and his notes, people cuss at him and ask him to go back to India; once a man appears out of nowhere to flip his middle fingers; one group flings a bottle at him, the crystal shards gleaming in one photo of where it struck the footpath; elsewhere a couple of juveniles accost him with a used condom. Even when there is bonhomie, like when he joins a couple of teenage boys on their way back from school, nastiness forces itself in the form of a woman, speeding by in a car, calling him a paedophile. On one occasion, a South Asian acquaintance appears to be telling something deep about his own experience with the city, when Uttamchandani finds his bread stolen from a bag of groceries he had left behind at the door of his house. “Janaab,” the acquaintance tells him, “is sheher mein, they’ll steal sugar from your chai and you won’t come to know.”

Photographing a new environment anywhere in the world is always fraught with some tension. But it is interesting to consider that a White photographer capturing images of India – often with a certain narrow viewpoint – while it could be challenging in its own right, is unlikely to experience hostility at such a level.

Uttamchandani’s book however doesn’t dwell on these acts of insecurity and unkindness. His real purpose is to capture the city, and probably the country, at this particular moment in time, with all its anxieties, neuroses and moments of tenderness and warmth. If in one picture he depicts a coin lodged out of reach in the narrow space between two stones on a footpath, with the opposing page describing him being threatened for taking pictures, and then being hustled for some money; elsewhere a woman on a wheelchair, perhaps at the airport after a long flight, is straining herself to greet a dog. In another, a squirrel climbs the legs of a man who appears to be playing a game with it, and throughout the book, are warm pictures of couples in various places, dancing at the waterfront, joking about in the city, relaxing in a park. Sometimes the tenderness and terrors exist on the same page. He once finds himself watching a little boy spread a train compartment with joy, just as his aunt matter-of-factly informs how the boy’s father killed his mother in a drunken rage.

Uttamchandani has an eye for telling – and often quirky – details, and you encounter this often in these images. In one image, cartons are racked up to form, perhaps, the dwelling of a homeless individual, amusingly outside a shopfront that identifies the area as King’s Street. In one house, two windows of a house are shut, but a third is left open with the message ‘Try’, as though a challenge to break in. One particularly amusing image is that of a picturesque English neighbourhood, where a brilliant sun has come up to spread a bright blue sky over several splendid two-storied homes with manicured bushes and fences. But at one corner, you find a man lying fully stretched out, entirely motionless, on the road. He could be a drunk, or perhaps even a corpse.

“It was hilarious,” Uttamchandani recalls. “Because after a bit, as I was taking pictures, he just sat up, peeled an orange, ate some, and left.”

Uttamchandani’s only brief as he took these pictures were the first three messages his partner had texted when he arrived in the city. The first ‘Where are you’ forms the title and the second ‘Out and about yet’ the first page of the book. The third message lies hidden in code inside the book. “… In the time I was there, I did what any dutiful partner would do. Cook, clean, shop, wander and stay out of trouble.

One my first day, she sent me three messages which defined my engagement with this new city,” he writes in the book. “Come what may, no matter how far or near I went, I was always back home before she arrived.”

Where are you  is both a sensitive and amusing take on a city. Perhaps you shouldn’t be entirely surprised. The book begins with the image of a swan swimming in a lake. But unlike most images of swans –where photographers are almost compelled to capture its grace and beauty – here neither the swan, nor the lake look particularly pretty.

The swan has in fact dipped its head entirely into what looks like fairly unclean waters. What is it doing, what is it searching, the photograph urges us to ask. Is it a representation of the city looking into its depths to retrieve something, or perhaps it is the photographer himself, searching for something that is there, but not always evident.

ManchesterphotobookphotosRitesh UttamchandaniWhere are you