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Photographer Ritesh Uttamchandani’s latest zine happened by accident — literally.
In 2010, a hit-and-run left him with a broken leg and nearly a year of recovery at home. When he began moving around again, he traded his bike for Bombay’s local trains, a slower, more observational mode of travel that reminded him of his college days. He started carrying books to read during his commute. But what caught his attention was the unsolicited readers around him. People would often peer into the books he was reading which irritated him. “In our city, and in our country, the line between public and private space is very elastic," he notes.
So he began photographing it, crammed inside compartments, sweating it out, trying to position himself opposite an unsuspecting reader and captured the moment of snooping which sometimes would last anything from microseconds to 10 minutes. Over time, this practice evolved into 'Snoops On A Train', a zine that documents the comical dynamics between Bombay’s male commuters and their uninvited spectators.
The zine is as much about the act of snooping as it is a physical embodiment of it. “Initially the edit was very linear. By the third or fourth image even I was bored,” he says. But the breakthrough came during binding: “I opened up the stitch and just placed one image on top of another.” Images overlap, interrupt, and peek out from behind others, echoing the experience of snooping on the train. One photo starts on page one and finishes on page thirty-six. You have to 'snoop' your way through the zine to see the whole picture. This half image that you see is also like the analog version of snooping where you only catch a piece of the reading material on the train. "The person snooping can only read as much till his or her stop arrives," Ritesh explains.
Printed on rough, uncoated, temperamental paper — “just like our trains and their commuters” — the materiality of the zine lends to its storytelling too. It includes one deliberately untrimmed edge, emulating how passengers spill out from the footboard. “I wanted the material and form to reflect the lives and textures it depicts,” Ritesh says. Even Comic Sans, chosen for the cover, was intentional. “I just needed an excuse to use it,” he laughs. “And this seemed perfect.”
This irreverence is paired with a deep thoughtfulness rooted in how Uttamchandani sees photography; not just as a tool of representation, but as a medium of resonance. “I tend to think that any photographer, any writer’s way of seeing or doing things is influenced by childhood,” he says. His own was shaped by a rich oral and literary tradition. “I was fed a steady diet of short stories, folk stories, fables in English, Hindi, Sindhi" And then there were outside influences with friends who spoke Marathi, and Gujarati which Ritesh used often for navigating work as a photographer for a newspaper.
Other earliest visual memories include watching his father read the newspaper by the window — images seen flipped, from behind the pages or his sister’s snapshots of family outings to the beach. A convergence of these influences and these small acts, recorded and remembered, formed the foundation of how he sees the world today. “Little acts of kindness, cruelty, generosity — I was able to pick up on them early,” he says. “These quiet, small moments hold a lot of meaning. It’s a matter of acknowledgement.”
His early career was in photojournalism — snapping images of building collapses, fires, sporting events. “Very dramatic stuff,” he says. “It taught me how to make images fast and work in difficult environments. But it also weighed me down.” Over time, he started distinguishing between "reactive" images and "responsive" ones. This isn't unlike what Roland Barthes refers to in his book Camera Lucida, as "studium", the social and cultural interpretation of the photograph vs the 'punctum', a specific detail which provokes a deep and personal reaction. Ritesh likes his images to say something that goes beyond what's on the surface.
That shift in approach also drew him toward self-publishing. After facing a few disheartening experiences while trying to work with institutions and publishers, he turned inward. “If I have something to say, and it’s truthful and close to me, I’ll just push forth,” he insists. His first book, 'The Red Cat and Other Stories', was entirely self-published. So was his second, 'One Fine Morning in March', shot in Manchester. The format changes each time, always dictated by content rather than convention.
“I don’t want to make books that are easily classifiable,” he explains. “I didn’t want to follow any kind of formats that the text should come in the beginning, there should be a preface, etc. I wanted it to be as free-flowing as the novels I read.” Snoops On A Train, however, is more like a short story than a novel — small, sharp, and structurally experimental.
Ritesh is also committed to making his work accessible. He recalls being unable to afford expensive hard cover coffee books during his time as a student which is why he keeps the price of his books below ₹1500. "A lot of people have money and they can buy any amount of books for any amount of money but my goal is to ensure that these narratives remain accessible to people so that the culture of seeing images improves; that people are exposed to different viewpoints of storytelling and production. That cannot be achieved by having books in the price range of ₹2000-3000," he shares.
For his Mumbai book, Ritesh wanted to capture a portrait of a city that is built by something else other than its usual cliches and icons. And so he chose to photograph not the Gateway of India, but a replica made by the contractor who built it. This ethos that centres the marginal over the spectacle also runs through Snoops On A Train. Instead of objects and people, it's the relationality between them and their setting that becomes his subject — the stolen glances, the melting boundaries and "the unspoken and often humorous relationship between Mumbai's local trains and the city’s commuters".
Follow Ritesh here.
