© Mahtab Hussain

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In You Get Me?, Mahtab Hussain focuses on the identity, ostracism, rejection, and shame experienced by many young, working-class South Asian men in contemporary Britain and the tension between those feelings of displacement and the men’s desires to become Westernized and accepted. Looking to film and television for role models, the young men take violence for masculinity and adopt the postures and symbols of African American gang culture—chains and teardrop tattoos— to assert a sense of self. Hussain’s intimate portraits reveal the tentative, and at times painful, transformation of individual identity against a common backdrop.

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