Kalpesh Lathigra can’t remember taking this photograph, though he has a rough idea of when and where. It was early one morning last summer in Junagadh, in the western Indian state of Gujarat. He was out walking with his camera before the heat became too much to bear. The colour of the sari would have drawn his eye: that shade of blue appeals to him. But the moment itself – seeing the woman crossing the street, raising his camera to frame her against the building’s rough exterior – remains a blank in his memory.
For that reason, he’s happy to throw it open to interpretation. “It allows the audience to tell its own story,” he says. When I ask what story he brings to it, he laughs. “It’s a funny one. Is it about lost love? It feels very romantically melancholic, because you can’t really see her face. It’s that thing about missed opportunity, ships passing in the night, two people failing to connect.”
There may be a greater sense of loss at play here, too. Junagadh is where Lathigra’s father was born, but he left aged 10 when the family moved to Kenya. Later, he settled in London, where Lathigra was born and raised. As a child, Lathigra says he absorbed a romanticised view of India from his parents and popular culture. But when he travelled to the country as an adult, he felt disconnected and struggled with “the idea of Indianness, and the expectation of what it means to be Indian”.
By the time he got to Junagadh, Lathigra had grown comfortable with documenting the city not as a person searching for his home, but from an outsider’s perspective. “My education in photography has always been the Euro-American model,” he says. “In India that allows me to work in a very particular way.” The resulting photographs, on show this month in Mumbai, convey that sense ofoperating at a remove. In this image at least, a feeling of loss remains – a longing for something that, like the face of the woman in the blue sari, will forever be just out of reach.
Kalpesh Lathigra’s The Lives We Dream in Passing is at the NCPA Photography gallery in Mumbai from 12 February to 3 March