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ESSAY

Portrait of Bangladeshi photographer Shahidul Alam by Fariha Karim

Portrait

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Shahidul Alam: Giving Voice to the Lions By Salma Hasan Ali

He was taking curious but evocative photographs: a pair of eyeglasses of a

pashmina weaver; calloused feet working the pedals of a loom; dozens of tillis

wrapped in wool of every hue lining the looms. Children surrounded him wherever

we went, tugging at his bright magenta kurta and clamoring for their pictures to

be taken. He would take their photograph, and show them their images captured in pixels for the !rst time. Sometimes hed

disappear, turning up a few minutes later amidst a herd of goats or on a nearby

treetop, always !nding the right vantage point for the story he wanted to tell.

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We were in Srinagar, Kashmir in the spring of 2008, as part of a gathering of artists and intellectuals invited to inaugurate a center for Kashmiriyat studies. For me, this was also an opportunity to pursue my lifelong passion with pashmina shawls. Nervous about wandering outside the hotel given the tense security situation in the city, I decided to ask a fellow participant to join me. It was the fancy camera around his neck that swayed me perhaps he wouldnt mind taking photographs for my story, I thought. He graciously agreed and we set o" with the pashmina wala, meandering through barbed-wire-lined streets and sheep-!lled alleyways with Kalashnikov-armed soldiers at every turn. Little did I know then that in the seat next to me was one of the worlds most renowned photographers. Shahidul Alam has won photographys most prestigious awards. His work has been exhibited in major museums including the Mu-seum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Tate Modern in London, and the Museum of Contem-porary Arts in Tehran. He is the !rst Asian to win the prestigious Mother Jones Award for documentary photography and the !rst non-Caucasian to chair World Press Photos international jury. He has turned his hometown of Dhaka, Bangladesh into a photography capital, drawing many of the most celebrated international pho-tographers to teach and mentor, and turning out some of the !nest emerging photographers in the world. His new book, My Journey as a Witness, has been hailed by legendary photo editor John Morris as one of the most important books ever created by a photographer, and it goes far beyond photography. But Alams achievements and recognitions tell only a small part of his story. It is his passion and mission that make him truly revolutionary. With photog-raphy as one tool in his tool box, which also includes writing, activism, teaching and social entrepreneurship, Alam is on a mission: to change the way we see each other, the way we interact and engage with one another, as hu-man beings, societies and nations. Alam, in his bright cotton kurtas, brown leather chappals, cream pocket-lined vest, and ubiquitous camera pouch around his waist, crisscrosses the globe from exhibit openings to curatorial assignments to speak-ing engagements, sharing his message, as he did when I heard him speak at the PDN/PhotoPlus Expo in New York City in 2008. When you think of a country like Bangla-desh, the !rst images that come to mind are

of #oods or disaster, he said at the keynote. We need to question that. Stories of our part of the world, by and large, are told by people who have been sent out to discover that world. Largely, white, Western photographers are sent to countries like mine, and people like myself !nd ourselves represented by them. I !nd that problematic. Alam challenges the terminology used to describe the region third world or developing world which, he says, helps perpetuate the stereotype of these countries as hopeless and poor. I personally dont intend to be third of anything, he often quips. In the early 1990s, Alam coined a new phrase majority world to rede!ne what oth-ers call the developing world in more positive terms that recognize not only the fact of numbers, but also the vast intellectual, social and cultural assets that reside in the majority of the worlds population. He doesnt deny the reality of poverty, but his photographs o"er us another perspective: a farmer replanting his !elds after a #ood destroys his live-lihood; a !sherman heading back to the sea that swallowed his family; a migrant worker whispering a tender goodbye at the airport, unsure when, if, he will return. An image of poverty should not reduce people to being icons of poverty, Alam says. Alam reveals the beauty of his country and the resilience and dignity of her people. His photographs, a hundred of which are included in his book, capture how people live, work and carry on, despite seemingly insurmountable odds. A photograph of a patient at Bangladeshs only psychiatric hospital reveals an intimacy rarely seen in images of those whom society has written o". Another of a woman cooking on her rooftop after #oods inundated her home shows her getting on with life and tending to her family. One needs to recognize that here is a people who will, come what may, persevere. $eir endurance, their tenacity, their ability to over-come whatever there might be, I think is what needs to be cel-ebrated, Alam said in an interview with National Public Radio.

Pictures have power, Alam says, and its because of that power that he became involved in photography.

Shahidul Alam teaching photography to children in the village of Phandauk, in Bangladesh.

!e glass wall in Zia International Airport separates migrant workers from their family. A gap in the door is the only way they can speak to one another. A woman speaks to her man as he is about to depart. He will then face the gap and speak, the woman turning her head to listen.

PORTRAIT: SHAHIDUL ALAM: GIVING VOICE TO THE LIONS

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Woman cooking on the rooftop of her house during "oods. 1st September 1988. !e water went up another three feet.

Women in Aurungabad, Maharashtra, fetch drinking water from afar in the early hours of the morning. E#uent from sugar cane factories have polluted local waterbodies making the water undrinkable. !e workers are migrants from Rajasthan, who work as bonded labourers.

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A woman tends to jute plants in Northern Bangladesh. Eighty percent of the world's high quality jute grows in Bangladesh. Jute is used in making cloth, shawl, ropes, carpet backing cloth, gunny bags and many other useful things. Jute bags are very suit-able for packing of food grains.

Fishermen in Shondeep, Bangladesh, repairing their boats after the cyclone in April 1991.

Alam says, the Floating Forest was photographed at the Kew Garden in London, during my early years as a photographer. It was photographed in Kodak Infra Red !lm, which requires working with an opaque !lter and special processing. As one has to e"ectively photograph blind, and the end results are very di"erent from what one sees, it was one of my !rst attempts at visualising an image as !lm sees it, as opposed to what one sees with ones eyes.

Boatmen in Dal Lake clearing weeds early in the morning. Srinagar, Kashmir, India. May 28, 2008. Famous for its natural beauty, Kashmir refers to the Indian-administered state of Jam-mu and Kashmir consisting of the Kashmir valley, Jammu and Ladakh; the Pakistani-administered provinces of the Northern Areas and Azad Kashmir, and the Chinese-administered region of Aksai Chin. About 12 million people live in Kashmir, of which around 70% are Muslims. $e rest include Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists. Hindus live mostly in the south and around the city of Jammu. To the east is the Ladakh region, where the ma-jority of the people are Buddhists and of Tibetan origin. Most of the Kashmiri people work on farms. Others are engaged in small industries making shawls, rugs and carpets. Kashmir is well known for its wool and, in particular, its shawls and carpets.

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What bothers Alam is the lack of plurality in who gets to take the pictures, and the unidirectional way in which stories are told. Even if a di"erent type of photograph is taken, thats only the !rst step in a complex process of how images are seen. $e photograph needs to be contextualized, reach international media markets, and pass the scrutiny of editorial gatekeepers who decide what reality they want to reveal, Alam explains. He sees his role as not just a photographer, but as someone who manages how a story engages with an audience. He often quotes an African proverb to encapsulate this message: Until the lions have their own storytellers, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter. Alam is giving voice to the lions. In 1989, Alam set up a picture agency called Drik (vision in Sanskrit) in Dhaka to make it easier for majority-world photog-raphers to make their work available to broader markets. Step by step, he set up photo labs to make quality prints; established gal-lery spaces to display work; printed and sold calendars and post-cards door-to-door to raise funds; set up Bangladeshs !rst email service, as international phone calls and faxes were expensive; and started training women and poor children in photography to pro-mote diversity in the !eld. Drik later established Banglarights, a human rights network, and DrikNews, an independent news outlet that relies on citizen journalists. As Drik gathered momentum, the next step was to set up a school of photography, and Pathshala South Asian Media Academy was established in 1998. Alam attracted high pro!le international photographers to come to Dhaka to teach, includ-ing Reza Deghati, Pedro Meyer, Robert Pledge and Raghu Rai. Soon Pathshala students were winning prestigious awards such as Mother Jones, World Press and National Geographic All Roads. Today, many regard Pathshala as one of the best photography schools in the world. Chobi Mela, the !rst festival of photography in Asia, was inaugurated in 2000. Held biannually, with bold themes such as freedom, exclusion and resistance, it brings together Bangla-deshi photographers with their international counterparts to showcase photography, exchange ideas and, most importantly, challenge viewpoints. An innovative feature of the festival takes

artwork out of the galleries and into the streets, to the people whose stories are being told. Mobile exhibits on riksha vans travel to football !elds, school playgrounds and markets, allowing thou-sands of people to engage with the images. Chobi Mela VII on Fragility will take place in Dhaka in January 2013. More recently, Alam co-founded Majority World, a photo library and agency with o%ces in London and Sri Lanka that connects majority-world photographers with image buyers in de-veloped countries, again to more widely promote local stories as told by local storytellers. When I !rst sat down to interview Alam at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York, it quickly became clear that this is a man known and loved by many. One after another, friends, colleagues, students and family members who had gathered from all over the world, found him and wanted to be with him. With his genial charm and irrepressible laugh, he bear-hugged each one. I never thought of becoming a photographer when I was small, Alam tells me. Im from a middle-class home, and the expectation is to aspire to a respected profession such as doctor or engineer. Alam, born in Dhaka in 1955, went to the United Kingdom in 1972 for higher education. He pursued a PhD in chemistry at the Univer-sity of London, and got into photography partly by accident. When he had an opportunity to travel to the United States, a friend asked if Alam would buy him a camera. When he returned, his friend couldnt pay for it, so Alam was stuck with the camera. He started

He often quotes an African proverb to encapsulate this message: until the lions havetheir own storytellers, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter. Alam is giving voice to the lions.

A nurse combs the hair of a mental patient in Hemayetpur, Pabna. At the time the photograph was taken, Hemayetpur was the only mental hospital in Bangladesh, having 400 beds.

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teaching himself photography, reading every book he could !nd 800 or so over two years. His background in chemistry helped him experiment with di"erent processes and techniques. Alam worked as a research assistant to !nance his PhD, and started printing pho-tographs to pay for his growing passion for photography.

In 1983, a photo Alam took at Londons Kew Gardens, called Floating Forest, was selected best photograph of the year by the London Arts Council. It gave him the con!dence to pursue his in-terest as a profession. Alam started taking portraits of children, but felt he was getting too comfortable in his role as a photographer so he returned to Dhaka in 1984. $ere he set up his own studio and started taking photos for company brochures and !lm stars. But he soon realized that his passion lay in photographs of a di"erent kind. In the late-1980s, a democratic movement was simmering in Bangladesh, and Alam, always having been political, wanted to document it. He took to the streets, taking photographs of police attacks, students breaking curfew and ordinary people showing courage, himself being beaten and arrested in the process. He knew then that the camera would be his tool to advance social equality in his country and globally. When Lt. Gen. H. M. Ershad fell in 1990, Alam organized an impromptu exhibition of photographs of the democratic struggle at the art college. Lines to see the show were more than a mile long, and nearly 400,000 people saw the images in almost four days. Pictures have power, Alam says, and its because of that power that he became involved in photography. $e image that has had the greatest e"ect on Alam is that of an 11-year-old orphan boy named Mizan, who worked in Alams par-ents home. Mizan would watch television from outside the living room, through an open door. Alam captured that image and shared

it with his mother and Mizan. After that, Mizan watched TV from inside the living room. It was a small but important victory for me, writes Alam in My Journey as a Witness. It may not have changed the world, but it changed my mother and it certainly changed me. Alam has been using the power of images ever since, to chal-lenge peoples assumptions, stir their complacency and rouse them into action perhaps no more profoundly than in his recent exhibit called Cross!re. Cross!re refers to the extrajudicial killings by Bangladeshs Rapid Action Battalion (RAB), an anticrime group set up eight years ago. In a series of evocative photographs, Alam depicts the places where victims of cross!re were last seen, based on extensive research of cases. $ere are no people in these photos, no bodies or signs of violence. $e intention is to reach much deeper, to agitate at an emotional level. $e government shut down the exhibit on opening day in Dha-ka, causing nationwide protests. Alam and his colleagues held an impromptu launch outside the gallery; later the closure was de-nounced as illegal. Cross!re was recently exhibited at the Queens Museum of Art in New York City and is traveling to the Power-house Museum in Australia in November 2012. About 500 posters of the exhibit are being distributed to human rights organizations inside and outside Bangladesh. Even the Supreme Court of Ban-gladesh has asked that the work be shown in the court. While immediately after the show, cross!re deaths went down, they began to increase again, Alam says, and RAB changed its tactics and began to 'disappear' people. Alam is currently working on a story about a woman activist named Kalpana Chakma, who disappeared 16 years ago. Collaborating with a theater artist, Alam is planning a photographic performance to address disappearances and extrajudicial killings in the region, scheduled for June 2013. Alams drive is relent-less, his energy boundless, and his travel schedule peripatetic he re-cently racked up half a million frequent #yer miles, before using them to reunite family members across continents. On a recent stopover in Washington, D.C. en route to Albuquerque, New Mexico; London; Colombo, Sri Lanka; Mal, Maldives; and Bangalore, India Alam tells me about his next project: to set up a world class media university in Bangladesh, with high level professors and a residential campus. Im convinced that education, media and culture are the three most pow-erful change agents today and I think what were trying to do, done well, would undoubtedly make it di%cult for autocratic governments or democratic governments that behave autocratically to get away with exploiting its people. Alams journey, as a witness, but more so as a catalyst for social and political change, continues unabated.

Salma Hasan Ali is a Washington DC based writer focusing on cross-cultural issues and people making a di$erence, and Chief Inspiration O%cer of Mover-Moms, an NGO that promotes community service. She is also a contributing editor to !e Islamic Monthly.

Alams drive is relentless, his energy boundless, and his

travel schedule peripatetic.

Im convinced that education, media and culture are the three most powerful change agents today and I think what were trying to do, done well, would undoubtedly make it difficult for autocratic governments or democratic governments that behave autocratically to get away with exploiting its people.

PORTRAIT: SHAHIDUL ALAM: GIVING VOICE TO THE LIONS

Mizan, a young boy watching television, sitting by the door. He can enter the room only for work. He is not al-

lowed to sit inside the room. Dhaka, Bangladesh.