"The Photographs I Love" 14 — Shahidul Alam

“The tide will turn, and the nameless, faceless people will rise.”
(Shahidul Alam) 

Shahidul Alam. 
“Lokman”.  Nanyang Technological University (NTU). 
Singapore, 1999

There are some photographers with whom you feel a strong empathy, which comes first from books and their photographs and then, if you are lucky enough to meet them in person, is confirmed and strengthened by the skin.

So it was for me with Shahidul Alam, the next photographer I want to tell you about.

His book “My Journey As a Witness”, from 2011, was one of the very first books I bought, because it was a rarity to find photographic books that told about Bangladesh, a country that was a strong inspiration in my path as a photographer, as I have already written many times.

I bought that book because it was a door that opened onto a country that I was starting to know, and it became the discovery of a great photographer.

 

Shahidul Alam, born in 1955 in Dhaka, has a complex personal history and intense activity.

It's not easy to summarize everything he has done, not only as a photographer, but primarily as a human rights activist.

Shahidul Alam began photographing almost by coincidence. A PhD student in Chemistry in London, Alam bought a Nikon FM for a friend on a trip to the United States and Canada in 1980, but the friend couldn't refund it, so he kept the camera.

“I started using it,” Alam tells to TIME magazine of Dhaka. “It was when I recognized, working as a social activist, how powerful images were, that I decided I’d become a photographer.”

 

Shahidul Alam with a Rohingya family. 
Foto: Mohammad Shahnewaz Khan, 2017.

Since then in 1989, he has co-founded the Drik Picture Library with his longtime partner, anthropologist and writer Rahnuma Ahmed, to recruit and represent Bangladeshi photojournalists and advocate for free speech in his country. In 1998 he founded the Pathshala South Asian Media Institute, a photographic academy that has graduated some of his country's most interesting and successful young photographers, and in 2000 Chobi Mela, the first international photography festival in Asia. He became the first person from South East Asia to chair the World Press Photo jury in 2003 and has received numerous awards, including the Shilpakala Padak, Bangladesh's highest artistic award.

As the great Raghu Rai wrote:

“In India we have many more photographers, some of them very good, and there are many galleries for art and especially photography. As well as reputed newspapers and magazines – much is happening on many levels. But we don't have a Shahidul Alam, who can combine them into a cohesive social and creative force.”

It is no coincidence that the introduction to his book was written by Salgado.

Both come from that part of the world that Alam himself called the “Majority World”, to replace that “Third World” created by the West to maintain certain differences that are now out of the real history of nations and their political geographies .

 

Precisely for his activity in defense of human rights and freedom of speech and press he was arrested, spending 107 days in prison, until a worldwide petition from artists, photographers, journalists and ordinary people forced the government to free him.

His latest book “The Tide Will Turn”, from 2019, is partly dedicated to his detention, which takes its title from the conclusion of the letter that the Indian writer Arundhati Roy wrote to him when he was in jail.

A very intense and private book, which shows not only his days in jail, but also the battles he has carried on over the years such as the one for the young student Kalpana Chakma, who disappeared in June 1996, because she resolutely defended the rights of tribal peoples of the Chittagong Hills from government abuse.

Alam traced her life and last moments, like a forensic photographer – with  accuracy and a lot of mercy.

As soon as I arrived in Dhaka, last February, I immediately had the intention of being able to meet Shahidul Alam, and thanks also to his availability and kindness, the dream came true, not many days before my departure.

We met in his Pathshala academy, before it moved into the new location, and we exchanged our books. He told me about his school, his activities. It was a beautiful moment that I will not forget; it's essential to have confirmation of certain human qualities that can be read in the photographs and which then sincerely belong to the person too; too often photographs and words are better than the people behind the camera.

What is striking about Alam is his attitude and his good-natured smile.

He has seen a lot in life and knows how to deal with storms.

I want to underline this aspect because it's not often that you can meet your own myths.

 

Shahidul Alam. “Girl at Anwara”. Anwara, Bangladesh, 1991

Anyway, back to us, in this latest book there are also other images of his long project “Migrant Soul”, which is one I love most. Because this was one of the strengths that made me love his work: it was not just a matter of images and faces that told about Bangladesh, but it was also focused on the theme of migration, on the difficulties of its people forced to emigrate to survive, which has always been my common interest too.

It was therefore inevitable that his first book became a cornerstone of my library and of my Cultural Mediation courses.

 

Furthermore, during my stay in Malaysia, as well as in my continuous travels by plane, in the airports of Doha or Abu Dhabi, I saw with my own eyes the subjects of his photographs, all those Bangladeshi who worked in the construction sites of the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur from 1998, or the tired and lost faces of those waiting for a return flight in airports. In every street and construction site in Malaysia there are hundreds of workers from Bangladesh, as well as the cleaners of the airports of the large and rich Arab capitals.

Obviously no need to say anything else about all I have seen in over ten years with the Bangladeshi community in Rome.

 

Shahidul Alam. Maldives, 2000

Shahidul Alam. “Airport goodbye”. Dhaka Airport. Bangladesh, 1996

It is difficult to choose a single image. 

Shahidul Alam has been working on migration since the 1980s – as he told me – and has not stopped yet. 

But this one of Lokman in Singapore struck me immediately, for several reasons.

First of all for the visual impact, with these powerful blacks and whites against the light; for the sense of loneliness that this image emanates; and then for the words of Lokman himself that Shahidul reports in the caption:

“There are Bangladeshi girls from well to do families who study here. We hear them talk to each other in Bangla, but when we try to talk to them, they pretend they don't know the language.”

In these few lines, combined with this photograph, they make a truly disruptive condition experienced by thousands of workers abroad. More than hundreds of pages.

Essential and powerful. Heartbreaking.

The condition of a cleaner that becomes an existential category, not just a working one. Ignored and rejected, almost with disgust, by the wealthy classes of his same people.

I realized this many times even here in Italy.

Those who are lucky enough to be able to make a better life in a foreign country tend to look away from those who, same blood and country, remind them where they came from. The pride of those who prefer to ignore the dark part of their skin. Of those who look from over and even pretend not to know their language, so as not to “mix”.

Just the Bangladeshi who died defending their language, founding their nation...

 

But Shahidul Alam no, he doesn't look down on. As a world-famous photographer, school director and award winner.

No. He drops to floor level. He photographs Lokman from the ground, so that his figure rises, regains all his value as a human being, as a “migrant hero” (bayani, it is said in Tagalog, the hero who leaves the Philippines, sacrificing his life abroad for ensure a better life for his family at home).

In this image there is all the love and respect of Alam for his people, especially the weakest and most defenseless part.

Photographs speak and tell a lot if you are able to read them. Perspectives and points of view too.

In his being kneeling in front of a cleaner, in his solitude, Shahidul Alam reminded us of what respect means. For the weakest, for the voiceless.

And that is why thousands have moved to be have him released from jail.  So that his voice is never gagged.

As well as our eyes.

“Peace here I seek, in this sand and soil,
this place where I was born”
(Shahidul Alam)

 

Me and Shahidul Alam. Dhaka, Bangladesh, February 2020

READ ALSO:

• "The Photographs I Love" 12 — Francesco Zizola
• "The Photographs I Love" 13 — Karolin Klüppel 

Link to see his series "Migrant Soul": https://universes.art/en/nafas/articles/2009/shahidul-alam

Shahidul Alam: “My Journey As a Witness”(SKIRA, 2011)
Shahidul Alam: “The Tide Will Turn” (Steidl, 2019)

 

Italian version