Beauty is Mystery: "My Bangladesh" Photo Series (10)

“It's not how a photographer looks at the world that is important. It's their intimate relationship with it.” (Antoine D'Agata)

Ukhiya, Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh, 27 February 2020

This is the last photo of ten with which I tried to tell my three weeks in Bangladesh. It was not easy to choose them and certainly we could go on and on, but we need to limit ourselves. However, this doesn't mean that in the future I will not talk about Bangladesh anymore.

For now, we enter again into the refugee camp of Rohingya in Cox's Bazar, which I have already talked about for the photo of the Rohingya girl. This photograph was taken exactly in front of the door where that girl had appeared, it was the house opposite.

Two powerful images in less than two meters of each other, almost as if it was a black hole of beauty. Beauty, not in a canonical sense, but as Goffredo Parise wrote: “True beauty is always mysterious: it is felt, but it cannot be said.”

There are several versions of this photograph, I shot continuously as soon as I noticed that something was moving behind the curtain.

I was still intent on photographing the children in front of me when the curtain opened and the mother looked out but the first shot went burnt because it was a sudden movement, with a very strong sun, which burned the girls in front of me because I was focused on the mother in the shadow. 

Basically, the mother was ashamed and hiding behind the thick curtain, and only the baby was seen in her arms, but she was curious to understand what was going on, so after a few attempts she dodged the curtain and went out. But this photo is the best for me, because it maintains its mysterious, vaguely disturbing charm.

First of all, to my taste, part of the beauty of a photograph is always in the colors, in their harmony. In this case, the orange and earth hue. A splendid book that I recently bought talks about the different shades of color and their history. The color of this curtain seems to be a different shade of simple orange, but a nuance called minium, which derives from the “miniature” in the Middle Ages, or the typographic art of inserting a symbol or a drop cap of that vibrant color to capture the reader's attention.

And put in that central way, it is truly a magnet for the eye, with the child's clothes that are red and pinkish tints, and the mother's dress in the same color as the canes that hold the house.

It's a harmonious whole to the eye, from the chromatic point of view. Then there is the symbolic aspect.

Sometimes it happens that the photographs confirm or become the visual counterpart of an idea or sensation that we have in our mind. If we know a place or a situation before living them, our mental images often precede the visual ones, and then when we find ourselves in front of them what happens in literary analysis is called “agnition”, a topos of classical Greek literature: the sudden and unexpected recognition of a character's identity, which determines a decisive turning point in the story.

Here, this photo was my agnition of the idea that I had made before about the conditions of the Rohingya, and then visiting the camp: a people who fight in the dark to try to protect an identity that is violently denied. And who pays the most of the consequences, as usual, are the most vulnerable: women and children.

In this sense, photograph of the hand holding tasbih, the Muslim rosary, had a very powerful meaning in narrating their persecution for religious reasons, but still I prefer the first photo for the position of the central curtain that drawn up in the black background.

The woman who comes out of the closet also has a symbolic value because her being hidden behind the curtain is actually the iconography of the denied identity of her people: it's the face that we are not allowed to see, because the identity of the people is in the face.

There is only this orange curtain that looks like a blood flow. There is darkness behind it, and the face of the boy with lost eyes; not even being in the arms of his mother gives him a smile.

This photograph was the strongest visual moment for me, because as Antoine D'Agata said, it is not so much how we see the world that is important, but it's how we relate intimately to it that matters.

It was my relationship with the drama of the Rohingya population, even if only metaphorically – through an image.

* * *

THESE ten photos in this series have been a way to tell you about my intimate relationship with Bangladesh, or rather, with Dhaka, for the short time I have been there.

It's not possible to exhaust this relationship with ten shots, as well as in just three weeks, moreover in ten years that I have been several times in Jakarta I think I have seen even half of this city, and I am convinced that Dhaka is no less.

A life time is not enough to know certain places, but this also applies to people whom we believe to love and know deeply. We are like these cities.

Even if we love them intensely, we have known them for a long time and we explore them every day, there will always be streets, neighborhoods in which we have never been.

Loving is like remembering a face: in reality we never remember a moving face in the past but always like many static photographs that our memory tries to compose to form the idea of the face that we want to remember. So is love.

It's always an aspiration and a hope, never a real possession.

My ten photographs of Dhaka are my memory of this city and its people.

Inevitably incomplete,

necessarily imperfect,

but from the bottom of my heart.

Me with Rohingya children in the camp. Ukhiya, Cox'z Bazar. Bangladesh, 27 February 2020

Kassia St Clair: “The Secret Lives of Colour” (UTET, 2019)

Italian version