Picture Series

Since I began with photography, I’ve been on a journey to find my own voice. Over the years my journey has taken different turns. But I found my voice in photography when I discovered my social-activist mother trying to follow her faith in social work. I began to work on marginal people of Bangladesh, especially about the violence on minor, tribal or ethnic groups of people in remote hills or a village in the peripheries of Bangladesh. In each of my work I try to challenge the mainstream perspective towards these issues.

A boy called Shuvo (pseudonym), age 18, used to work with me as a fixer, when I was working in remote places. We spent a lot of time together. He was a shy boy, helping his family by random jobs. No particular job to be very specific. Next time when I went there, I heard he was dead by police encounter. I was shocked! Shuttered!

As far as I came to know that young shy boy in the last couple of years, it is a bit complicated to understand his connection with any sorts of crime that may have led him towards that fate. I started digging into it more. I expected it to happen again. It is still going on and becoming a political culture. More than 4,000 people were picked up randomly last year. They were tortured and killed sometimes by a so-called “encounter”. (Note: The term “encounter” stands for killings of people in police encounters.) A practice of fear. I thought of initiating to break the chain through a photography project. I collaborate with a psych counsellor to provide them counselling. Those who got back alive are going through tough trauma of mental and psychical torture. They wrote about their anxiety on their own portrait as a part of healing. This photo project is an initiative to make photography a part of a social movement.

I believe we are living in a visual era. The instant access to social media and other such public platforms makes it so much easier to outsource visual elements to the public. This method of storytelling enables readers to better understand complex, sophisticated topics in a shorter amount of time. It is the job of the storyteller to use data to create better stories that are useful, interesting and digestible to a wide audience. On the one hand it looks like there is an end of individual journalism, at the same time this is a time when visual journalists can take it ahead. Visual journalists will not only produce stories but also take initiative to take responsibility to research and come up with possible solutions. It will not be individual but in collaboration with society. It is the visual which will lead the future of the world philosophically, ideally and politically.