Fashion photographer Elaine Constantine emerged from Manchester's Factory Records scene in the early 1990s, and was responsible for introducing woozy ravers and northern-soul speed freaks to the pages of the Face and Vogue. Now she is back in her home town for her toughest assignment to date: photographing the world of afternoon tea-dancers.
The Ritz ballroom, where her subjects were shot, is but a shimmy from the Castlefield Gallery's impressive new premises. The dance hall is rapidly becoming engulfed by modish developments, but still forms a pocket of resistance from the days when dancing in Manchester meant putting your arms round your partner rather than brandishing a bottle of mineral water.
"People come from miles around for the tea-dances at the Ritz - from Preston, even Rochdale," explains Ernie, a retired train driver who has come to see the show. Ernie and his friends helpfully point out the distinctions between old time and modern sequence technique. "See 'im?" he says. "'E's from Chorley."
Constantine's afternoon party people stretch in frieze-like configuration around the gallery. After a while it is not so much the couples you notice as the spaces between them. Their world is less strictly ballroom than sparsely functional - far from the glamour of Wurlitzers, sequins and tails. Constantine projects images of plainly dressed figures orbiting morosely around a municipal landscape of stacking chairs, badminton courts and broken radiators.
Although everyone in the photographs is ostensibly out for a good time, a heavy sense of melancholy hangs in the air. The dour atmosphere is attributable to Constantine's crepuscular, low-exposure lighting, but the fact that the couples seem to cling to each other like life-rafts rather than lovers adds to the sense of time running out. Everyone appears to occupy their own transports of delight, never quite meeting their partner's eye. It is a pity that nobody dances in pairs any more, but here partnership seems only a different form of isolation.
Until June 2. Details: 0161-832 8034.
