My Journey as a Witness

"My book documents the journey of an activist as a photographer. I suppose it’s also a history book – the photography movement in Bangladesh was immersed in its political struggles. I was on the streets during the protests against General Ershad’s regime. There was repression and people were killed. When Ershad announced he was stepping down on 5 December 1990, it was a major public victory, because the people had brought down a very powerful general. It was a phenomenal thing to be part of and observe. The experience led to my career in photojournalism. “Where a picture makes a difference is that it’s much more difficult to block out a photograph, because of its immediacy” As a photographer I’m a very late starter. I come from a middle-class home, and most middle-class men in Bangladesh are expected to take on respectable professions. Photography doesn’t fall into that category. I’ve always been a very political animal. I wanted to play a role in working towards social equality, in my country and globally. The media seemed the most sensible place to do that. I think the level of repression has increased in Bangladesh. It’s ironic, in the sense that we now live in a democracy – to the extent that there are regular elections. I shot those photographs for an Arts Council project. I felt it was important to take pictures of the English aristocracy. By and large, what I’d read about photography was about European conquests – how anthropologists, writers, and sociologists came to the colonies to index and categorise us, by documenting the width of our cranium, the length of our penis, and all other attributes. “This is what you are,” we were told. So I thought perhaps I should turn this thing around. The project’s theme was “work”, and I wanted to photograph people of leisure. Work is seen in terms of activity, but not in terms of the power structures that determine it. I thought it would be interesting to look at the people who decide what work is and how it is regulated, but rarely have to do manual work themselves. It wasn’t an easy project – the better-off have doors to close on your face. It was difficult to explain what I wanted to do and still be allowed to take the pictures."