The Veil of Smile: "My Bangladesh" Photo Series (7)

“Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, 

but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy.”

(Thich Nhat Hanh)

Women in a slum area. Raja Bazar, Dhaka, 23 February 2020

Sometimes we have to let ourselves be led also by the feelings of others in evaluating our photographs. Each of us may love some photos more than the others; but it's also important to observe how many people agree to consider an image more interesting or fascinating, that perhaps, to us, had not seemed so powerful.

It's obvious that every photograph that I choose to publish is among my favorites compared to many others that remain in the archives, which probably will be fished out later in months or years. Because as we grow and change, it may as well change what we are passionate about or moved by. Even the “idea of beauty” is changing over the years.

This happened with the portrait photograph above. After my return to Italy, I published many portraits of faces: women, men, young people and children from Bangladesh. But this was the photo, to my surprise, that I liked the most. It is also commonly liked either by men or women, from Malaysia, Italy, Indonesia and Bangladesh itself. So, it's the photograph that I wanted to choose as a symbolic portrait in this series of ten images to talk about Bangladesh, after the Rohingya Girl. And then, I try to understand.

Every photograph is a question. Indeed, it should be so; a question that we asked to ourselves and to others who look at the photo. All the more, it is the reason to portrait, I believe. 

“Making a portrait is the most difficult thing for me. Very difficult. It's a question mark resting on someone,” said Henri Cartier-Bresson.  A deep truth.  In this case, then, it's not the classic portrait with one face, but there are two women.

Let’s see the background story. 

“Ek Ronga Ek Ghuri”: lesson with the neighborhood children. Sukrabad. Dhaka, 23 February 2020

It was one morning when I went to visit the class of the NGO “Ek Ronga Ek Ghuri” which offers lessons to some children who live in a poor neighborhood, a slum in Sukrabad. Although not like the one I visited in Dhaka, made of huts and garbage that I have already talked about. Raja Bazar is a crowded neighborhood, with old condominiums between very narrow streets, often with single-room for the family and a kitchen on the ground floor shared throughout the building. But at least they have a roof and the buildings are solid.

Shared kitchen for tenants of the condominium. 

Raja Bazar, Dhaka, 23 February 2020

After class, some children took me to see their apartments where they lived, climbing stairs and running through the narrow alleys. In one of the narrow streets leading to these apartment buildings, crowded with people—even more so if a foreigner arrives with a camera accompanied by the children who live there—these two ladies were there.

There was not much space to walk. So they, seeing me arrive, approached the stone wall to let me pass. And, in that moment, I portrayed them. In this case only a single photo, because the children ahead of me, impatient, were already entering a building and I would have missed them. So, one photo, a smile, “Dhonnobad”—thanks in Bangla language—and I went away.

Honestly, I also really like this photo: there is a woman in the foreground, a faded older one behind and a man walking in the distance. The second woman has a dress with very strong and bright colors that give energy to the image, since the colors of the veil of the first woman are almost the same as the wall and the man's shirt. Purple and black.

It is difficult to tell the age of the woman, as often happens in Bangladesh, but certainly she’s still young. Her smile is sketchy. But the gaze is very powerful, from a perceptive point of view, because while the right eye is on the vertical line of the thirds, the left eye is in the central line of the frame: two characteristics that increase the strength of the eyes, for those who is observing, as we know from studying the rules of composition in photography.

This is the aesthetic reading of the image.

But, obviously, this is not what leads so many people to love her. There must be something else. And it's very difficult to understand it. As Cartier-Bresson said, it's a question mark.

I really love to portray and read faces. I have been doing it for many long years. And, in the last ten years, I have had many lessons from Asia on reading faces in photography. And I am always fascinated by it. As I always quote, the most beautiful and apt definition about portrait is in the verse of the Iraqi poet, Amal Al-Jubri:

“Faces are languages without an alphabet 

faces are letters that always remain closed.”

The emotional semantics of the thirty-six facial muscles that change imperceptibly every second, only twelve related to lips. On which every time we must ask ourselves, even on what considered as taken for granted by everyone. 

See for example the smile. It' obvious to each of us what a smile is. But then it's not so obvious if, after a century, we are still questioning the smile on the lips of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa.

Meeting a woman wearing niqab, the Islamic veil that covers the whole face and leaves only the eyes uncovered, and having the certainty that she is smiling at us must make us reflect.  It's not so obvious, or irrelevant, to ask ourselves where that certainty comes from. The eyes are the mirror of the soul, a way of saying that is common to all languages and latitudes. 

Therefore, the answer is immediate: if you don't see the lips, you know that a person is smiling by looking at the eyes. Yes of course, and also the muscles near the eyes. Because smiling lips act on the network of muscles that are on the rest of the face.

And this is the physiognomic reading.

Part of the charm of this portrait is in the way the woman looks at me. In the placid calm of the gaze, and in the smile that is minimally sketched on the lips, a micro movement, like the surface of the sea rippled by the breeze.  From there, we try to get into her eyes, because that's where the question mark is. At least, this happens to me. 

That's why I love the Cartier-Bresson quote. I always want to try to answer that question.

The gaze is calm, but she has a note of heaviness, even as her head is slightly tilted back.

She is not a woman from uptown, or a girl you meet in Dhaka's trendy restaurants. Maybe she wasn't even born in the capital, as it happens for most of the people who live in slums or in very populous neighborhoods.

She has a melancholy sweetness, a gentle smile that cannot be seen, held in the heart, maybe accentuated by daily survival. Slowly the veil falls between us who look at her and dialogue with her language without alphabet.

And her beauty—yes I know, this is a word hated by many photographers and critics of photography and art, but I will never be tired of filling my mouth with this word—is perhaps precisely in this contrast, in the dark colors of the veil and the wall that surround her, in the calm but tired, heavy gaze, and those closed lips, which do not fall into the category of meaning of a smile; even that they smile. From inside.

It gives us the awareness and hope that at the bottom of every difficult situation, in the grayness of daily endurance, there is always a thin thread of light, impalpable but possible, like a muscle that you don't see, but moves it. Like a smile.

And it's an invitation to never give up, to keep pulling the oars in the boat and close the eyelids, to resist and smile. Maybe that's why this sweet woman is loved by so many people.

That's just what we need, right now.

Mother with daughter, school student. Raja Bazar, Dhaka, 23 February 2020

Clément Chéroux: “Henri Cartier-Bresson - The gaze of the century” (Contrasto, 2017)

“I have not sinned enough - Anthology of contemporary Arab poetesses” by Valentina Colombo (Piccola Biblioteca Mondadori, 2013)

Italian version