Shahidul Alam: My Journey as a Witness

This inspiring personal journey offers unique, insider perspectives on Bangladesh and its many messages of struggle and triumph. Shahidul Alam is a photographer, writer, curator and activist. A former president of the Bangladesh Photographic Society, Alam set up the award winning Drik agency, the Bangladesh Photographic Institute, and Pathshala, the South Asian Institute of Photography; considered one of the finest schools of photography in the world. Over 30 years, Alam’s leadership in Bangladesh has led the way in developing photography as a discipline, with an entirely new generation of acclaimed artists in the international arena. His style is personal, sometimes fast paced, often reflective, with magnificent imagery interwoven throughout the narrative. This book showcases Shahidul Alam’s photographs, more than 100 colour and black and white plates illustrating the journey of an artistic, social, and political witness from inside Bangladesh. This ground-breaking work retraces his visual journey and personal vision spanning three decades, and provides the best interpretative and investigative angles into a culture and national reality, hitherto often misunderstood in the West. Using photography and journalism as its parameters, it is the first comprehensive vision of Bangladesh; these images are not ‘about’ the region from a European perspective; this is not an ethnographic account of an ex-colonial world. Instead, its on-the-ground insight aspires to explore its topography with decidedly indigenous eyes. Alam founded an artistic movement that cannot be silenced: the emergence of ‘indigenous’ photographers, achieving an intimacy with their subjects that truly understands their human condition.