Drik

Launch of the book and documentary film "The Birth Pangs of a Nation"

Shahidul Alam, Managing Director of Drik raises his hand to greet friends watching on live streaming the launch of the book and documentary film “The Birth Pangs of a Nation,” celebrating 40 years of Bangladesh’s turbulent history. Dhaka, 12 Dec 2011.
Launch of the book and documentary film "The Birth Pangs of a Nation"

Guests discuss the book and the film at the Chhayanaut Auditorium, Dhanmondi. Dhaka, 12 Dec 2011.
Launch of the book and documentary film "The Birth Pangs of a Nation"

David Burnett/Contact Press Images, contributing photographer who was in Bangladesh in 1971 holds the book “The Birth Pangs of a Nation.” “It was impossible to be unaffected by it [the experience of seeing children sick and dying in 1971]. I was more sensitive as a Dad when I became a father, in a way that my wife and daughter wouldn’t understand.” Dhaka, 12 Dec 2011.
Launch of the book and documentary film "The Birth Pangs of a Nation"

The book and a documentary film titled “The Birth Pangs of a Nation,” celebrating 40 years of Bangladesh’s turbulent history was launched on 12 December, 2011 at the Chhayanaut Auditorium, Dhanmondi, Dhaka. From left to right: Abdul Hamid Raihan, contributing photographer; Shahidul Alam, Managing Director, Drik and Editor; Craig Sanders, Representative, UNHCR Representation in Bangladesh, and David Burnett, Contact Press Images, USA, contributing photographer.

Introduction

Drik, Bangladesh is a distinctive multimedia organisation that has made challenging social inequality its central driving force. Over the last two decades Drik has successfully partnered with national and international organisations to conduct several successful socially responsible programs. Investigative reporting is an essential part of these programs. Credibility of information combined with powerful images presented in these projects have made it possible for Drik to bring out into the open opaque and delicate social issues for public debate and discussion. Thus, inherent in Drik’s work is this ability to use the power of the visual medium to educate, inform and draw ...
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Shahidul has managed to create a community… a truly concrete ensemble, which is a composite of all generations attached to their native soil, who share a much vaster territory than that of any one country.
Sebastião Salgado
Photographer

You’ve done an amazing job and the problem is that you keep getting better and better – particularly Pathshala. I am in photographic education. I genuinely believe that Pathshala is the best photographic institution in the world right now, and we all aspire to be that.
D.J. Clarke, Director of Visual Journalism, Asia Center for Journalism; Lecturer, University of Bolton.

It is a deeply ambitious organisation, aiming on the one hand to be a 'challenge to the CNNs of this world, and on the other hand to be a local force for change. … [Drik] remains unbridled in its politics – against all odds.
Antonia Carver in Drik Images for change in ART AsiaPacific (Issue: 35, July/August/September 2002)