Grooming shooting stars

Image taken from the projects that formed the workshop

Supported by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), this workshop provided food for thought and a common ground for young and upcoming photographers most of them third year students from Pathshala--and photographers working with daily newspapers.

The objective of the workshop was to create a stronger base for documentary photography and also to discuss how to make a photo story. Altogether 16 photographers split up in four groups to portray four issues water, slums, local trains and Eid shopping. The workshop also featured lectures and slide shows of photographs by three internationally renowned photographers from Bangladesh Abir Abdullah, Shahidul Alam and Shehzad Noorani himself.

During the shooting session, four members of each group documented the given topic with a view to integrated story telling in the final photo project. Each group was allotted only one day to shoot the entire project the seemingly inadequate time slot was designed to help photographers learn how to choose important aspects and finish a job efficiently under severe time constraint. Concrete planning before shooting and good team effort ultimately paid off, as the final photo projects revealed a closer look at contemporary urban issues.

Speaking about the workshop, Kakoli, a participant commented that lack of state-of-the-art equipment often discourages young photographers here, especially because their peers in developed countries can easily afford them. Having Shehzad as the instructor turned them into optimists as Shehzad has been able to carve his own niche in the international arena even though he is a Bangladeshi and comes from a humble background.

Currently living in the United States, self-taught freelancer Shehzad Noorani has worked for many big international organisations such as, World Food Project, UNAIDS, Save the Children Fund and Unicef. While speaking about photography in Bangladesh, he was quick to reckon Shahidul Alam as the Father of Contemporary Documentary Photography in Bangladesh, adding that without the political beliefs of Alam who plays a bigger role as an activist than a photographer there would be no documentary photography in Bangladesh. He also held the workshop participants in high esteem, greatly admiring their artistic tendencies, team spirit and social commitment.