With a simple glass device, the London-based Pakistani-Bengali artist turns archival photo books into sinister revelations on British colonial histories
Tag: Bangladesh
The 2025 Wellcome Photography Prize highlights global health challenges through powerful images spanning domestic abuse, climate migration and microscopic disease
The story of the 13th-century Sufi saint led Adib Chowdhury around South Asia – and to the heart of today’s economic strife
For his Leica Award-winning body of work, Sea Beach, Ismail Ferdous returned to the seaside of his childhood. For millions across Bangladesh, it is more than just a tourist destination
Photography’s rules are made to be broken. Having become frustrated with the medium’s conventions, five artists discuss how sculpture, 3-D maquettes, activism and X-rays keep photography alive in their work. Next up is Sofia Karim
“Photography works as a home that holds all my enquiries and explorations of the various kinds of human experiences,” says Chakrabarty
Fatiq captures the essence of his immediate surroundings and those further afield through his atmospheric images
With an ongoing fictional story, Aishwarya Arumbakkam documents the deconstruction of a Bangladeshi village Each…
10 May 2019
Giulio Di Sturco’s decade-long project Ganga Ma documents the effects of pollution on India’s holiest…
2 May 2019
“Chobi Mela continues the way it began,” writes Shahidul Alam. “Unyielding to power.” He’s referencing the very first Chobi Mela festival, which opened in Dhaka, Bangladesh back in 2000. Alam and Robert Pledge had painstakingly put together an exhibition on Bangladesh’s 1971 war, which a government minister – phoning at midnight – wanted to censor; rather than comply and remove the offending prints, Alam and Pledge moved the entire exhibition to a new venue, which opened at 3pm the next day.
“That is how we’ve always done it,” writes Alam, the founder of Chobi Mela. “Against the odds, facing the storm, with the wind against our face.”
Though he doesn’t mention it outright, it’s difficult to read his comments now without also thinking of Alam’s own recent experience, in which he spent 107 days in Dhaka Central Jail last year. The 63-year old photographer and Drik Gallery director was arrested on 05 August after stating in an interview with Al Jazeera that the wave of student protests in Bangladesh last year was a reaction to government corruption. He was charged with violating Section 57 of Bangladesh’s Information and Communication Technology Act (ICT) – which has been used in more than 20 recent cases involving journalists, most of them related to news-reporting – and was held for more than 100 days.