Artists/Photographers

The image of women in our country or the wor-ld disturbs me deeply. All over the world, the status of women is si-milar - a 'product' to satisfy needs of men. Every society has its own form of abuse. This medium (photo-graphy) is the most modern, and arguably the most powerful. My feeling of accountability for the injustice and that inspires me to go on working as a photographer.

It's easy to work with poor people, as the photographer can take advantage of a relative sense of po-wer - and often does. But we don't recognise these issues when working with the upper or middle classes. I want to work with these themes in the future. I even think about work-ing on aspects of my own family - ups and downs of relationships, gender relations, rela-tionship between ser-vant and master, rela-tionships between fellow servants. All these are, however, extremely difficult to photograph. There is only one solution this - working away like mad.

Alongside, my work as a photojournalist, I also teach photography, and that is the main job in front of me. In Bangla, there are no good book on photography, or photo-journalism. That is also an aspect I want to address. I have already started working on this through Pathshala. Sometime in the future, I would like to make a book on portraits of children, called Portrait of Shadows.

I was once involved with the politics of social reform. My search for a clear-cut profession started when my school-teacher father, the only earning member of the family, died in 1989. In a way, I've just happened across photography in my search. Before this, I never found anything else that I wanted to make my profession. I want to do a lot - work with our history, our heritage, and the things we have for-gotten. Perhaps, oneday I'll make a film on these issues.

Whenever I take a photograph, I ask myself 'Why do I want to take this?' I want to photograph things that will work towards bringing change for people and society, which will help us understand the dis-parity between people. A lot of research-based work needs to be done for this. I want to establish myself as a professional photographer nationally and worldwide.

I am always exploring, and I don't want to put a limit on the spaces that can be explored. That's why there is no single answer to what I want to photograph. I want to deepen my experiences, to transform my opin-ions, to see something in a new light. And within that process, I may take photographs, or parhaps I may not.

I can't really say I want to photograph this particular thing or that - it's not just about taking a photo, but what I ultimately want to communicate. I've gone through certain things that concern me, and exploring some ideas is part of my goal. But most of all, I want to tell new stories, on people and issues that are unnoticed, or ignored by the media.

Manosh Chowdhury, Sameera Haque, Mohammad Anisur Rahman, Irfanul Islam, Mahfuzul Haque Babul, M. Imtiaz Rana, Rabishankar Ain, Mosharraf Hossain, Huidi Nylund, Atiqur Rahman Chowdhury and Khairul Haque Tutul were involved in the production of this calender.The portraits were taken by Abir Abdullah and GMB Akash