Sebastião Salgado

Shahidul Alam

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.

My Journey as a Witness

Vijay Prashad

A layered critique of autocracy in Bangladesh from leading photojournalist Shahidul Alam, with letters from Arundhati Roy "On the night of 5 August, I did not know if I was going to live or die," writes Shahidul Alam (born 1955), one of Bangladesh's most respected photojournalists, essayists and social activists, remembering his arrest, torture and eventual 101-day incarceration in Keraniganj Jail in 2018. Just a few hours before, he had given a television interview criticizing the government's brutal handling of the student protests of that year which had called for an end to social injustice--in his words, "the years of misrule, the corruption, the wanton killing, the wealth amassed by the ruling coterie." Combining Alam's photos and texts with those of collaborators, including artwork by Sofia Karim and fellow inmates, The Tide Will Turn documents his experiences, the global support for his release and the ongoing fight for democracy in Bangladesh. The book comprises a record of Alam's time in jail; a chapter each on art and politics; and an exchange of letters between Alam and writer Arundhati Roy.

Shahidul Alam: the Tide Will Turn

Catalog of photographs by various photographers of Bangladesh.

Shahidul Alam

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