ABSTRACT
Shahidul Alam has documented a wide range of events, including the movement for democracy in Bangladesh, natural disasters, human rights and social issues like class inequality, and murders by the “death squads” in Bangladesh. Alam’s work has been shown in museums around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Arts, the National Visual Arts Gallery of Malaysia, and the Tate Modern in Britain. With one agency, when the big stories came, they would actually send over their own photographer, ignoring the author altogether even though the author was already here. In terms of photograph, if initial glimpse is only point of interaction, then that relationship has not developed—not only between image and viewer but also between the people within image and person who is viewing. Photographers are such powerful people in influencing mindsets that their need to adhere to this becomes that much more important.
