Photo Essay Ceilings

In 2011, a Mumbai-based photojournalist was assigned to make photographs of a brothel in Sangli to accompany a reporter's story for a news magazine. While the photos did not eventually get filed, they are testimony to how a different viewing perspective can help one see a reality, as much as open up the question of urban interiority. These photos enable us to review a sense of space and architecture within dense towns and urban neighbourhoods, where it is the private that becomes public, where the insides of spaces ask for a narrative beyond the normative inside-outside binary used to view cities and its spaces. While the photographer contemplates the ethics of his task at hand, this set of photographs also questions the systems of documentation and analyses used to capture spaces, cities, and architecture.

- Ritesh Uttamchandani

In 2011, I was assigned by OPEN Magazine to take pictures for a story on the cleanest brothel in Sangli, a small town in rural Maharashtra, known for its production of sugar, turmeric, and electricity. It is also known among journalists and NGOs as the unofficial ‘HIV capital’ of the state. Baffled yet curious at the union of the two words, ‘cleanest brothel’, I boarded a bus to Sangli from Bombay.

I reached a day later than I was supposed to and Deepak, a local journalist, the ‘contact’ who was to take me there, had vanished. So I went sightseeing with Uday Deolekar, an old photographer-friend from Sangli. Our wandering yielded another story, about Ashok Awati, a bike mechanic on the outskirts of the town, who had built his own windmill using spare parts from bikes, and installed it on the trunk of a eucalyptus tree.

Deolekar happened to know Bandamma, the ‘madam’ of the brothel and volunteered to introduce me to her. I saw Deepak there, eating boiled chana on an old bench. He didn’t lift his head and hence didn’t register my arrival. To mess with him, I dialed his number. He looked at his phone, shrugged and disconnected. This was followed by a different kind of speechlessness a few seconds later when we came face-to-face.