Weegee’s photographs are as much about Weegee as they are about crime.
By James Polchin

In the digital age, people document and share everything – even insults to the fallen

Jonathan Jones

guardian.co.uk, Thursday 12 January 2012 18.17 GMT

Shahidul Alam on photography for change

Shahidul Alam walked on stage on Thursday wearing a marigold-colored salwar kameez, a camera over his left shoulder, and a beltpack slung around his hips. There was no mistaking his calling. The Bangladeshi photographer, activist and social entrepreneur has almost single-handedly rebalanced the world of photojournalism, long dominated by Western photographers and their worldview. He has shifted its lens eastward and southward by training legions of photographers in his homeland, creating an award-winning photo agency to sell their work and founding a prestigious international photography festival to showcase their talent. And this fall, he published a book, My Journey as a Witness, telling the story of Bangladeshi photography as an instrument of social justice. He serves as an ambassador of this movement, in the words of PopTech’s executive director, Andrew Zolli, “travelling the world leaving new cultures of art makers in his wake.” We sat down with Alam backstage in Camden, Maine.

PopTech: You founded Drik, a photo agency, and the Chobi MelaInternational Festival of Photography. Why did you feel it was important for Bangladeshi photographers, as well as their peers, to have these outlets for their work?
Shahidul Alam: Firstly, it was a question of addressing this very distorted perception people have of what I call the “majority world” countries. Our poverty is a reality, but that is not the only identity that we have. Secondly, I wanted to challenge a very unidirectional form of storytelling that has — to a large extent — been propagated by the West. The richness and diversity of human life gets lost in a very agenda-led information distribution system. So that was the beginning.

We also wanted to celebrate our own culture. It’s not that I am against white, Western photographers producing work in Bangladesh — I think our ideas need to be challenged just as much. It’s the monopoly of dissemination that I was against. So we wanted to create a space for diversity — for both Western work and our own work. That’s where the Chobi Mela festival came in — to facilitate that cultural infusion.

Yesterday morning, in your presentation at PopTech, you showed a few examples of mobile photography exhibits — on rickshaws and tuk tuks — going places where that kind of exhibit has never been before. You called it “Taking the Gallery to the People.” Why was it important to you to get photographs out of galleries and out of the city?
In some ways, I am part of the problem I’ve been describing. I’m a middle-class male photographer. If I were in a slum, photographing a woman who probably doesn’t have a door to slam in my face in the first place, the power relationship between the two of us would not be very different than the power relationship between her and a Western photographer. We are perpetuating a situation in which the disenfranchised do not have the opportunity to tell their stories. To address this, we started doing two things: One was training women photographers; the other thing was teaching working-class children photography. I’ve very happy that today our agency has a large number of women and people who have come from a middle-class background. And they have a very different story to tell.

What kind of challenges do photojournalists in Bangladesh face today, and have they changed since you started out?
There are differences in terms of degree, but in principle they’re still the same. Let me give you an example. Several years ago there was an exhibit in London about the Millennium Development Goals, put together by Oxfam, Christian Aid, Save the Children — several major NGOs. All the work was produced by white, European photographers. So I asked one of the organizers why this was the case, and he replied to me that the curator had mentioned to him that “they” — meaning us — “did not have ‘the eye.’” A statement like that about women, people of color, people with handicaps of any form would be completely unacceptable in this day and age, yet here was a curator dismissing an entire group of cultural producers from what I call “the majority world”. In response, we collected work by majority world photographers, and they produced a calendar called “Having the Eye.”

Why did you put together your new book, My Journey As A Witness?
I thought it was important to document the phenomenal shift — the marvelous revolution that had taken place in Bangladesh. The book is also challenging in a very tactile way the fact that, still today, for many news organizations, the only answer is to send out a photographer to countries like Bangladesh.

Does the book itself chronicle your career?
It chronicles the movement — and my career as part of that. But it talks much more about political and social environment in which we’ve evolved. It’s not simply about photography, but about the geopolitical space we live in.

Do you think digital photography and the access to digital photography is democratizing the kind of storytelling you’ve been doing all your life?
I think the fact that so many people have digital tools certainly will change the predatory nature of media. But that’s only a small part of it. If I am photographing a farmer in a field in Bangladesh for, let’s say, the New York Times, the person who’s probably most knowledgeable about the situation is the farmer. Through my proximity, I know a little bit less. The person who probably knows the least is the editor at the New York Times. He or she is the most powerful person in the chain and the farmer probably has no say in how that story is told. So I think that the publishing process needs to be subverted, and until that is done, I don’t think simply producing more imagery will change things.

Image: Kris Krug for PopTech

This interview has been edited and condensed.

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The inaugural talk at the Pop Tech Conference in Maine on 20th October 2011

Listen to the audio

Morning Edition [7 min 19 sec]
November 14, 2011
Steve Inskeep talks to Shahidul Alam, a former chemist who became a photographer because he was tired of seeing images of the developing world through the lens of Western photographers. He now runs an art gallery, a photo agency and a school of photojournalism in Bangladesh. He recently published a book of stunning photographs called My Journey as a Witness.

——————————————
Transcript:

STEVE INSKEEP, host: Twenty years ago, a cyclone devastated Bangladesh, and the photographer Shahidul Alam says he received a request for news photos from The New York Times. Mr. Alam says he argued successfully for different kinds of images to make the paper.

SHAHIDUL ALAM: They wanted bodies. They wanted destruction. They wanted to show the horror of the cyclone which was important, of course. But what is also important was the fact that people were rallying around to support each other; that farmers were replanting their seeds; that fishermen were going out into the sea; that human beings were trying to rebuild their lives.

INSKEEP: Alam says he wants to give the world a fuller image of poor countries like his. His new book of photos, called “My Journey as a Witness,” does not flinch from Bangladesh’s many problems. But his photos also seek to show the rich colors, the expressive faces, the very human lives of crowded places like the mega-city of Dhaka.

ALAM: Dhaka has a lot of people but it’s also a vibrant city. There’s a lot of energy there. There’s entrepreneurial ship. Almost every person that you know or see is there doing 10 different jobs, managing in very difficult situations, and coming out with some sort of a formula for survival, which really is to be admired.

INSKEEP: Let’s try to describe for people this photograph that I’ve opened here in your book. We’re looking down on Dhaka. We’re looking down on both banks of a river. Where were you when you took this photograph. I guess you must have been in an aircraft or something.

ALAM: Yeah, it was a helicopter. And that’s a story in itself because getting on a helicopter is a problem. But getting permission to photograph from a helicopter is another problem in a country like Bangladesh. A lot of the work that I do makes me unpopular with my government.

But this is one situation where the Prime Minister had actually commissioned me to produce a multimedia presentation, because he wanted to woo foreign investor into Bangladesh. So, we have this love-hate relationship.

INSKEEP: Is their photograph in this book that you got in trouble for taking or that you had to go through some trouble to get?

ALAM: Well, there’s a series of photographs where we were not allowed to show. That’s right at the end, a series called “Crossfire.”

Yeah, you’ve just opened that. That’s a paddy field. That’s part of a series on extra-judicial killings. And, as you will see, it’s just a paddy field. There’s nothing…

INSKEEP: A rice paddy.

ALAM: A rice paddy.

INSKEEP: But we’re looking at green plants. This lights up, close up.

ALAM: Precisely.

INSKEEP: It’s beautiful. What’s wrong with this photograph?

ALAM: The very question I asked the riot police who was guarding my gallery when we were trying to show this. When we tried to show this, the gallery was closed down. It led to a whole lot of things. But perhaps I need to give you the context.

INSKEEP: There must be a story, yes.

ALAM: In 2004, the government introduced a group called the Rapid Action Battalion. And this was a group of elite paramilitary forces who were brought in supposedly to curb corruption. They had impunity and, as in any situation where you give absolute power to people…

INSKEEP: With guns.

ALAM: Yes. It got out of hand and they essentially will people license to kill. And in this particular paddy field, a person’s body had been found and the villagers talked about how the situation was incongruent with the description of the government. Because the official version was that there had been an ambush and these people had died. And they talked about how the paddy field was undisturbed except for where the body was. How…

INSKEEP: In other words, there clearly had not been a big fight, an attack and counterattack. There was nothing.

ALAM: The man’s body had four bullet holes, the shirt he was wearing had none. So there were other things that didn’t fit. Now, what was very interesting is we produced an entire exhibition of which this was one.

The police closed the exhibition down. I did an interview after the policemen closing it down. And I asked this man, what’s the problem? What’s so sinister about this paddy field? And he says, yes, it’s a paddy field but you see that word crossfire – and there was crossfire written in bold red on the banner – didn’t you realize what that paddy field must have been? You realize what must have happened. You realize why this show must be closed down?

So here was this policeman giving me wonderful conceptual analysis of my own work, which was wonderful.

INSKEEP: Well, that’s suggests that they were right to be suspicious of you.

ALAM: Precisely. Because photographs have that ability to engage with people at a powerful level.

INSKEEP: I want to flip to one more photograph. This is – the caption says Woman Cooking on Rooftop in Dhaka, Bangladesh back in 1988. What we looking at here and what did you do?

ALAM: This was taken during what was probably the worst flood in a century. I was actually on a boat and, as you can see, the boat is at the level of the rooftops. So the water had come up. This woman’s home was obviously inundated. The only place she had was the rooftop. She has to carry on. Her family has to eat, so she’s cooking on this rooftop.

Quite apart from the fact that this was such a situation but she was getting on with life. She was tending to her family. One needs to recognize that here is a people who will, come what may, persevere. Their endurance, their tenacity, their ability to overcome whatever there might be, I think is what needs to be celebrated.

And you’ve just turned the page to another photograph. This photograph was taken immediately after that other photograph – the photograph that you’re looking at, which is a wedding.

INSKEEP: We’re looking at a wedding, yeah.

ALAM: It’s a wedding. There are lots of people. It happened to be a hugely opulent wedding, the wedding of the daughter of a minister – a powerful minister, taking place at a time when the country was really under this enormous flood.

INSKEEP: Beautiful women’s clothes. Men in suits and ties. Everybody’s hair looks perfect.

ALAM: Yeah. I mean, of course, we’re talking about Bangladesh. There is this divide between the haves and the have-nots. The people you’re looking at in this picture are the creme de la creme. They’re the ones with a wealth. They’re the ones who have the good life. They don’t actually contribute very much to Bangladesh’s economy.

Bangladesh’s economy is built on garment workers, on migrant workers, on the farmers in the field. They’re the ones we should be celebrating. They’re the true heroes of my country.

INSKEEP: You ever worry that the Rapid Action Battalion that you referred to before might come after you?

ALAM: I think if I’m doing my job right they should be coming after me. And if they were not coming after me, I would probably question my own position.

INSKEEP: Shahidul Alam, he is the author of a book called “My Journey as a Witness,” a book of his photographs.

Thanks very much.

ALAM: Thank you.

INSKEEP: It’s MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I’m Steve Inskeep.

RENEE MONTAGNE: And I’m Renee Montagne.

When the lions find their storytellers: A public talk by Dr Shahidul Alam

October 4th, 6 p.m.

National Geographic Store

83-97 Regent Street

London

Internationally renowned Bangladeshi photographer, writer, curator and teacher Dr Shahidul Alam, will lead a free public talk at the National Geographic Store next week.

During the 40 minute talk Dr Alam, a National Geographic juror and photographer, will discuss his 30 year career in documentary photography, as well as his role as one of the most respected photography educators in the world.

Dr Alam’s work in establishing networks for photography and media professionals in his native Bangladesh has opened up the medium to an entirely new generation of artists. As a result, Bangladesh now has the highest number of documentary photographers in the world, some of whom, thanks to his efforts, are becoming internationally acclaimed. Alam founded the award-winning Drik Picture Library (www.drik.net) in 1989; the Bangladesh Photographic Institute in 1990; Pathshala, the South Asian Institute of Photography – considered one of the finest schools of photography in the world – (www.pathshala.net) and ‘Chobi Mela’ (www.chobimela.org), a biennial international festival of photography, which is held in the capital, Dhaka. Alam’s most recent project is the founding of Majority World, a photo agency dedicated to providing a platform for non-Western photographers.

A jury member of numerous competitions including World Press Photo, for which he has been a judge on four occasions and recently the first non-Western person to chair the international jury, Alam was also the first Asian recipient of the prestigious Mother Jones Award for Documentary Photography. His work has been exhibited internationally, including: the MOMA, New York; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Royal Albert Hall, London; and The Museum of Contemporary Arts, Tehran.

Dr Alam’s week-long visit to the UK is a result of his first retrospective photography exhibition at the Wilmotte Gallery at Lichfield Studios (http://www.tristanhoare.co.uk/) from 5th October -18 November, and the release of his forthcoming book, SHAHIDUL ALAM: My Journey as a Witness, published by Skira, Milan, and edited by Rosa Maria Falvo. The book will be launched at the Grand Hyatt Churchill Hotel in London at 5.30 pm.

Martin Parr reveals the secret of taking photographs that tell the unvarnished truth

By Benjamin Secher
27 Aug 2011

‘Most of the photographs in your paper, unless they are hard news, are lies,” says Martin Parr. “Fashion pictures show people looking glamorous. Travel pictures show a place looking at its best, nothing to do with the reality. In the cookery pages, the food always looks amazing, right? Most of the pictures we consume are propaganda.”

Parr, 59 years old and perhaps Britain’s best known photographic chronicler of modern life, is sitting in the kitchen of his beautiful Georgian house in Clifton, Bristol. He has served me tea from a fine china pot and “posh biscuits” bought from the deli up the hill. Susie, his wife of 30 years, is stirring something on the hob. Everything looks rather lovely.

Everything, that is, except the appalled expression on Parr’s face when I suggest that sometimes, regardless of their truthfulness, pictures of things looking their best might be exactly what people want to see. “Of course,” he says, “but what people want…” He hits that last word with the force of a punch, then lapses into silence, as if the very thought of taking a photograph that perpetuates a fantasy disgusts him beyond words.

“If you go to the supermarket and buy a package of food and look at the photo on the front, the food never looks like that inside, does it? That is a fundamental lie we are sold every day. Part of the role of photography is to exaggerate, and that is an aspect that I have to puncture. I do that by showing the world as I really find it.”

A new exhibition, Martin Parr: Bristol and West, opening in the city next week, reminds us quite what a ridiculous, contradictory, dysfunctional and occasionally wonderful place Parr finds the world to be. Focusing on the part of the world that he has called home for the past 25 years, its 60 images, both old and new, suggest that whatever else has changed about photography over the intervening decades – the advent of digital cameras, the death of film – Parr’s gaze remains as acute and unsentimental as ever.

Has anybody ever looked their best in a Martin Parr photograph? Certainly not the mustachioed yacht salesman shot at Bristol regatta in 1989, his face, as he courts a couple of would-be buyers, frozen in a rictus of obsequiousness. Nor the group of girls Parr stumbled upon at Badminton horse trials, as much a product of good breeding and aggressive grooming as the fillies they have gathered to watch.

That picture finds its echo in another shot in the show, taken 20 years later, of a different quartet of girls of a similar age – smoking, teetering on a lamplit pavement on a night out in 2009, off-guard, half-cut, mouths open, eyes closed. Parr’s images frequently raise a smile by exposing the gap between the public faces we wear and the private motives and insecurities that, if you know when and where to point a camera, can be seen seeping out from beneath. But if there is a joke here, nobody has let his subjects in on it.

When he is taking a photograph, Parr says, his prime responsibility isn’t towards the people in shot, but to his viewer and to his own sense of the truth of the scene. “When someone says to you, ‘Oh, I don’t take a good picture,’ what they mean is they haven’t come to terms with how they look,” he says. “They take a fine picture, it’s just that their image of how they think they look is not in touch with the reality.”

I had always wondered how Parr got himself into such intimate proximity with the subjects of his photographs, who so often appear blissfully unaware of the critical lens loitering only inches from their faces. I suppose I’d imagined him to be a flatterer, or else a man of such discretion that people simply forget he is there and let down their guard.

In person, it quickly becomes clear that his chief weapon is not charm but directness. He shoots as he talks, with unflinching certainty and not a hint of self doubt. When I ask if he ever seeks a person’s permission before photographing them, that pained expression reappears. “You would never get anything done if you did that,” he says. “And besides, you still have the legal and moral right in this country to photograph anyone in a public place and do what you like with it.” So there.

Parr, who has been a member of the renowned Magnum picture agency since 1994, estimates he takes “tens upon thousands” of photographs a year. Unusually in this digital age, he prints out “maybe 15,000 of them” and, he adds, “If there are 10 good ones, it would be a good year.” Themes recur – “tourism, consumerism, the Americanisation of the world” – but his scope is dizzyingly broad: “I am interested in people and what they do,” he says, “the foibles of the world.”

As he approaches 60, Parr’s passion for his medium grips him as firmly as it did when his grandfather, an amateur photographer, first gave him a camera as a boy. “I can’t imagine a time when I wouldn’t want to take photos,” he says. “Photography for me is not work, it’s a calling.”

Martin Parr was one of the early photography trainers at Drik. His exhibition “Home and Abroad” was shown at Drik Gallery. Parr also gave a talk at the British Council, Dhaka.