PEOPLE making phone calls sounds like an odd subject for an exhibition, but a series of photographs of this everyday occurrence reveal a touching portrait of Manchester’s ethnically diverse population.

Photographer Dinu Li visited a number of phone booth shops – whose discount calls abroad make them popular with immigrants – to document the people who use them.

The resulting exhibition, Press the * and Say Hello, celebrates the 50th anniversary of Sam Selvon’s novel The Lonely Londoners – the first published work of fiction to describe a black immigrant’s experience of moving to the UK.

The book focuses on the Windrush generation and, as Li explains, making an international call home was an impossible dream to such migrants. As a response, he decided to create a set of portraits that illustrates how circumstances have changed for those settling in Britain today.

Li took his photographs in phone booth shops in Old Trafford, Longsight, Moss Side, Rusholme and Whalley Range to depict the closeness and intimacy experienced by people making such personal calls to their homeland, in contrast to the physical distance involved.

Li said: "I was intrigued by the emotional aspects of being inside a cabin and making calls to family and friends.

"Of course, as I have approached the project using still photography, you are denied access to sound so can’t decipher the kinds of conversations taking place in the photographs. Without this access, we are led to wonder if indeed the caller is local or a tourist."

He adds that he was "very interested in looking at the eyes of each subject, or what the subjects are looking at," arguing that his set of photographs are portraits "but not in the conventional sense."

"Nobody is looking through the lens of the camera and yet surely they are aware of my presence as I am sometimes only 50 to 60 centimetres away from them. It’s as if their gaze reveals how the individual is caught between a remembered time and place (the place they are calling) and the current reality (of a Manchester phone booth).

"Our distant homeland seems to be a time and place that we try to keep alive in our thoughts."

Press the * then say Hello runs at Manchester Art Gallery until February 22, 2009. For details ring 0161 235 8888 or visit www.manchestergalleries.org