Legendary Bangladeshi photographer Shahidul Alam comes to India with a new mission

When Bangladeshi photographer Shahidul Alam sent a nasty letter to the World Press Photo foundation in the 1980s, it was in response to the way his country was portrayed up until then by the international media. All the images of the country showed the grim realities of poverty and destruction, and the cyclone-ravaged countryside, he felt. “And though these were true, for us, that wasn’t the story,” says Alam, who was immediately invited by the foundation to be a fellow jury member and to give voice to the concerns he had raised. His letter had obviously made a dent on the processes of the prestigious photo foundation.

Today Alam is something of a legend among photojournalists all over South-Asia. As a crowd of enthusiastic photojournalists gathered on Thursday at the Y B Chavan auditorium in Mumbai, to get their work analysed and approved by Alam, it was clear to see the following this man has in India. “Our concern was that western photographers were showing only one aspect of our so called ‘under-developed’ countries” says Alam. He likes to politically replace the term ‘under-developed countries’ with ‘Majority World’. “We feel that it takes indigenous storytellers who are culturally sensitive to their realities to tell the whole story,” he explains. In 1989, Alam began Drik Picture Library, creating a base for the many gifted photojournalists who were quietly documenting the changing face of their disturbed country. As the library grew, Drik spread its wings to its SAARC neighbours and today, majorityworld.com, their online resource centre has more than 10,000 images, from all over the subcontinent.

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