Chobi Mela VI on Wall Street Journal

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JANUARY 19, 2011, 10:03 AM IST

Festival Puts Bangladesh on Photography Map

By Margherita Stancati

When one of Asia?s largest photography festivals, Chobi Mela, kicks off on Friday, it is expected to draw photographers from over 30 countries to a show that has turned an unlikely destination into an important stop on the international photography circuit over the last decade.
Photographers, many of whom are photojournalists, will be showcasing their work in multiple venues ? including on mobile rickshaw vans ? across Bangladesh?s capital city Dhaka for this year?s edition of the two-week festival.
Chobi Mela founder and director Shahidul Alam said the original idea behind the festival was to provide a platform for South Asian photographers to display their work and to connect with a global audience.

sumit dayal dal lake — Sumit Dayal, ?Patrol Boat, Kashmir.? Pictured above: A Central Reserve Police Force soldier patroled the Dal Lake at dawn

Mr. Alam said the festival is also about challenging the prevailing narrative on the history of photography, which he criticizes as heavily ?eurocentric.? Despite South Asia?s long-standing and vibrant photography scene, Mr. Alam said, ?It looks as though photography practice only happened in the West.?
Since it first started in 2000, the festival has grown in scope and size attracting internationally-acclaimed photographers and drawing around 200,000 visitors in recent years, according to figures provided by festival organizers.
This year?s theme??Dreams??may seem an odd choice for a festival known for photojournalism, which often captures harsh realities. Mr. Alam says there is no contradiction, pointing to the social vision that photography can convey.

The Queen???s Room, Zanana, Udaipur City Palace — Theme photo for the festival. The Queen's Room, Zanana, Udaipur City Palace. Photo Karen Knorr

Many of the artists who will be displaying their work at Chobi Mela?such as Britain?s Joanna Petrie and Karen Knorr, who?ll be showing works from her India Song series?frame dreams as conceptual fantasies. Others, including Dhaka-based Sayed Asif Mahmud and Spain?s Aitor Lara, capture them more as impressions of reality.
Many emerging talents from South Asia will be showcasing their work at this year?s edition, the festival?s sixth, including Bangladesh?s Munem Wasif and India?s Amit Mehra.
But Mr. Alam said Chobi Mela is not just about displaying works of art ? it?s also about creating a forum for photographers to engage in critical debate on the social role of their work.
With that in mind, running parallel to the 29 print exhibitions are a series of talks that include a video conference with International Criminal Court Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo. He is likely to address the role of photography in influencing public opinion on war crimes such as those allegedly committed during Bangladesh?s war of independence in 1971. A tribunal to try war crimes was set up in Bangladesh last year.
The violent struggle that led to the country?s independence from Pakistan in 1971 has been a running theme at Chobi Mela ? and the focus of its first edition.
?Not only was it so central to our existence, but the who?s who of photojournalism were in Bangladesh at the time,? said Mr. Alam.
Among them were French photographer Raymond Depardon, British photojournalist Don McCullin and American photographers like Mary Ellen Mark, and David Burnett, whose more recent work on Iran will be on display in Dhaka this year.
If you can?t be in Dhaka this weekend, you can still see the works that will be exhibited there through live streaming. And after Chobi Mela ends, the show will tour South Asia. Dates haven?t been set yet, but it?s expected to reach India in the fall.
Slideshow: A preview of Bangladesh?s Photo Festival.

Peter Bialobrzeski?s Workshop starts at Goethe

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Posted by Chulie De Silva at Chobi Mela VI blog

Photographs: Saikat Mojumder

The workshop will continue on the 20 and 24 January. 2011

Peter Bialobrzeski?s Chobi Mela VI Workshop ?Contemporary Documentary Practice? started? today at the? Goethe Institute Bangladesh.
This workshop aims to look at the possibilities of creating ?A sense of Place? within the context of the international Photo Documentary Scene. The Workshop is supported by the Goethe Institut.

Chobi Mela VI workshops begin

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Indian photographer Sohrab Hura is conducting a workshop ?Untitled? with the 2nd year student?s of Pathshala. The workshop theme for everyone is CARTE BLANCHE, which means everyone is free to do whatever s/he wants. It will continue till 21st January 2011.

Photographs by K M Asad

All Roads Photography Program

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Chobi Mela Featured in National Geographic website:

Photograph by Tom?s Munita

The All Roads Photography Program will be exhibiting its 2010 photography awardees at?Chobi Mela VI, an international festival of photography. Chobi Mela VI opens January 21, 2011 in Bangladesh. This year?s theme is ?Dreams? and is considered the largest exhibition of photography in Asia. The festival is considered to have the most diverse participation of photography in the world. Now having gained an international reputation as one of the leading photography festivals in the world it features 63 exhibitions from 33 participating countries that span all seven continents of the globe. Chobi Mela is unique in having been developed and launched in South Asia.
Shahidul Alam, Chobi Mela festival director and All Roads photography advisory board member, explains the festival?s theme, ?As dream merchants, we [photographers] create images that confront us with horrific facts, and allure us with magical metaphors. We seek a society where love songs are cherished and curiosity celebrated. We conjure up a mystical world, through light and shape and dancing pixels. We toy with perceptions and juggle facts. We trade in the currency of dreams, and flirt with an elusive reality. So to turn to dreams after [past themes] ?Differences?, ?Exclusion?, ?Resistance?, ?Boundaries? and ?Freedom? is perhaps to return to what holds us together in the face of all our obstacles, the foci of all our longings. To realize our dreams is perhaps the ultimate paradise. So we invite dreamers and wanderers and the soulful troubadour, to ignite our imagination. To provoke and goad us out . . . to dream.?
The 2010 Photography Program Awardees Are:
Rashid Talukder (Bangladesh)
Pioneer Photographer Award
Photo essay ?The 1971 Liberation War?
Tom?s Munita (Chile)
Mid-career Photographer Award
Photo essay ?Lost Harvest?The Death of Loa River?
Sumit Dayal (Kashmir)
Emerging Photographer Award
Photo essay ?On Going Home?
View the 2010 All Roads Photography Gallery Here
The Photography Program recognizes and supports talented international storytellers whose still photography documents their changing cultures and communities. Each year four photographers are awarded a financial prize, and their photo essays are exhibited at the All Roads Film Festival and other venues. They also receive photographic accessories and, through workshops, get valuable training to assist in their fieldwork.
Candidates are nominated by an advisory board of leaders from the photography industry and representatives from National Geographic Society.
Selection Criteria

Award recipients must be from an indigenous or minority culture within their countries of origin.
Award recipients? work must document their changing cultures and community and represent a recent body of work (within the last two years).
Potential recipients must be living in the countries that they are documenting.
Awards are based on artistic merit in combination with the photojournalistic focus of the project.

Raghu Rai's "Invocation to India"

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New Art Exchange and Aicon Gallery present
Raghu Rai’s Invocation to India
Curated by Saleem Arif Quadri MBE
Exhibition dates: 29 January – 30 April 2011
Private View: Friday 28 January, 6 – 9pm

Also taking place on the night: In Conversation with Niru Ratnam and Saleem Arif Quadri, 8pm
Rai?s work proclaims the rich diversity of contemporary India, with its juxtapositions of ancient and modern, where the people are the landscape. He photographs an India teeming with colour, history, beauty and brilliance whilst uncovering a continent’s domestic rituals with these striking images of Indian street life, festivals and the changing seasons.
“Over the centuries, so much has melded into India that it’s not really one country, and it’s not one culture. It is crowded with crosscurrents of many religions, beliefs, cultures and their practices that may appear incongruous. But India keeps alive the inner spirit of her own civilization with all its contradictions. Here, several centuries have learnt to live side by side at the same time. And a good photograph is a lasting witness to that, as photography is a history of our times: being a multi-lingual, multi- cultured and multi- religious society, the images must speak these complexities through a multi-layered experience.” – Raghu Rai
Rai, who was born in present-day Pakistani in 1942, came to India during Partition and has been witness to some of the most significant events in his country’s recent history. He was one of the first photographers on the scene after the 1984 Bhopal industrial disaster and has produced acclaimed documentary series on Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama and the late Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.
In 1977 Henri Cartier-Bresson saw his work at an exhibition in Paris, and recommended him to become a member of Magnum Photo Agency. Since then Rai has taken India as his canvas and produced works that he simply describes as slicing out spaces and moments in front of him. Rai has taken the documentary form associated with Cartier-Bresson and the Magnum tradition and pushed it in a way that responds to the specificities of India. He captures the ways in which the past co-exists with the present in India, and on a more subtle level, the visual rhymes and congruities between the different components in his works. His works attest to a multi-layered reality, where people, objects, animals and buildings jostle with each other, where people’s own personal space is overlaid and invaded by each other’s space.
Other major books include projects on the Taj Mahal, Tibet, Sikhs, Dreams of India, Tibet and his recent book on Indian Musicians (2010). A regular contributor to a huge range of international journals and British broadsheets, from ’90 to ’97 Rai judged the World Press Photo Awards.
With nearly 50 years of excellence and an extraordinary contribution to world photography and Indian photography in particular, in honour of his extensive photographic oeuvre and recognition of his commitment to excellence, in 1971 Rai was awarded one of India’s highest civilian accolades – the Padma Shri.
As part of Format International Photography Festival 2011
Raghu Rai has taught at Pathshala and has been a featured artist at Chobi Mela.
Raghu’s exhibition at Drik’s 20th anniversary

Countdown to Chobi Mela VI

Are you dreaming of coming to Chobi Mela VI or wishing you were coming?. A wish is voluntary and you make it consciously and have some power over making it come true.? Dreams on the other hand by definition, involve our unconscious mind. Do we have power over our dreams? Or do they have power over us? Can we make a wish come true ? 10 days to go to find out.

Yes, the countdown has started and taking a closer look at behind the scenes?of the festival?was Channel I, one of the partners of the Chobi Mela festival.

M. Mahbubur Rahman hard at work on the exhibition prints. Photograph Habibul Haque.

M. Mahbubur Rahman meticulously checks colours of prints. Photograph Habibul Haque

Getting ready for the interviews. Photograph Saikat Mojumder

Shahidul Alam, Festival Director on Chobi Mela VI: Our right to dream on for a better majority world. Photograph Mahbub Alam Khan

Abir Abdullah Vice Principal Pathshala South Asian Media Academy. Photograph Saikat Mojumder

This entry was posted in?Chobi Mela,?Chobi Mela VI Partners,?Dreams

Poet With a Kodak and a Restless Eye

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By?HOLLAND COTTER

Published: September 12, 2010

WASHINGTON ? The poet?Allen Ginsberg, who died in 1997, adored life, feared death and craved fame. These obsessions seemed to have kept him, despite his practice of Buddhist meditation, from sitting still for long. He was constantly writing, teaching, traveling, networking, chasing lovers, sampling drugs, pushing political causes and promoting the work of writer friends.

?Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg?: Neal Cassady and Natalie Jackson in San Francisco, in the show at the National Gallery of Art in Washington.?More Photos ?

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Slide Show

?Beat Memories?

In the early 1950s he began to photograph these friends in casual snapshots, meant to be little more than souvenirs of a shared time and ethos. Years later his picture taking ? often of the same friends, now battered by life or approaching death ? became more formal and artful, as if he were trying to freeze his subjects? faces and energies, and to show off his photographic skills, for the history books.
Nearly 80 pictures, early and late, many with handwritten inscriptions, are on view through Thursday in ?Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg? at theNational Gallery of Art here. Some are familiar; others rarely seen. As arranged by Sarah Greenough, the senior curator in the museum?s department of photographs, they form a continuous narrative. In the space of two small galleries we watch legends take shape, beauties fade, an American era come and go.
Ginsberg began his photographic chronicle of what would become the Beat generation in earnest in 1953, when he was in his late 20s and living on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He had known the group?s crucial personalities ??William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso,?Jack Kerouac and their communal muse Neal Cassady ? since his student days at Columbia. He regarded them collectively, himself very much included, as a new literary vanguard. The work they were doing in the early ?50s seemed to confirm his faith. And his early pictures, taken with a secondhand Kodak, project a buoyant confidence.
We see figures who would soon enough become cultural monuments still vital and mercurial. In one much-published picture Kerouac, smoking and brooding, is already a romantic hero, but in another he?s a mugging cut-up on an East Village street ?making a?Dostoyevsky mad-face,? to quote Ginsberg?s caption.
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Chobi Mela VI submission deadline extended till 14 August 2010

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Dear Photographers,
It appears that the extremely large number of incomplete submissions may have been caused by the server having problems coping with the very large number of entries. As such we have decided to extend the deadline for one more week.
Dhaka is six hours ahead of GMT. The best time to upload is between 10:00 pm to 06:00 am Dhaka time.
In case you still have problems uploading, please send a mail to Mostafa Sorower and we will provide you information to submit via FTP. Alternatively, please send mail by yousendit.com or some similar method with a mail to Mustafa and we will download it from here.
Best wishes,
Shahidul Alam
Festival Director
Chobi Mela VI

Soulscapes

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The soul in question

Amirul Rajiv

Curator & Editor Soulscapes

Today, we are threatened by a drive towards a rigid social conformity and the struggle between differing conceptions of public morality and individual freedom. In this battleground the soul plays the role of a pawn. `Soulscapes? desperately seeks to explore these issues, beginning with an examination of society – the soul created and recreated ? and then moving through photographs and texts that consider the soul abused, objectified, discovered, aroused, desired, censored, mythologized, manipulated and celebrated. The images are corporeal, about the strengths, and vulnerabilities, of this most tangible manifestation of personal experience, ourselves, whether the soul in question is a child, a victim of suicide, a burning body or someone at the point of prostitution. Curating and editing might really be an instance of self-censorship, one of the most subtle and insidious assaults on literature and the arts. We hope that our audience will take this exhibition of `Soulscapes? to heart and mind at a moment when our souls are increasingly questioned and menaced.

Akash Survivors — Survivors. ??GMB Akash

Soulscapes

GMB Akash
With every picture you take, you enter a space that is unknown to you as a photographer. In the beginning it feels like forbidden territory, a place you are not supposed to enter surrounded by borders of privacy you are not supposed to cross. You, the photographer, are there at a factory, a old home or a brothel with your simple black bag hanging from your shoulder, eying everything around you as you are eyed by the people there. The first days following these intrusions I never take pictures because they would not be good. I wouldn’t know the people I met, wouldn’t understand the place I had just entered ? my photography would be stale and meaningless.
But there is always that moment when it feels completely natural to open that bag. And also there is no way of telling why it comes. Suddenly, I have a friendly conversation, or the afternoon light makes everybody around me relaxed and mellow, or someone looks at me in a trusting yet familiar way.
Then I take out my camera, and for me and everybody around me it is the most natural thing to do. There is consent. People don’t accuse me, or reject me or pose in unnatural ways. They are just there, doing what they normally do. Then I click away, and it feels like a conversation, a conversation between me and the people, between me and the location, between me and the light, between me and the souls that make this place alive. In such moments a landscape becomes a soulscape.
After such moments, life where I am working becomes trivial again, and the next day everybody asks for their photographs, and there is no difference if the people are girls from a brothel, children who work in a factory or farmers from the countryside.
But these little exchanges bring us closer to each other, and the ties between us, which started with small talk and conversation and continued with the first pictures I took, will become deeper and more meaningful, and so will the pictures I take.
And the closer I get to them and the deeper our friendship becomes, the simpler my photography gets. I am no longer looking for special angles or artistic points of views; I just open myself to these people, take a good look, frame and wait for the right moment. When I walk home, I have all the moments that I missed in my head, and they will become my source of inspiration in the days to come.
I see the beauty of people and the human soul in the pictures I take. And though the circumstances of some of the people I portray may be grim, back-breaking, depraved, the people themselves are always remarkable characters and souls. And it is my duty as a photographer and artist to point with my pictures at every aspect of existence in the society and world I live in, to show what can be shown, to go deep into every milieu and also into every aspect of poverty, deprivation and hardship that I encounter ? because the only sin for a photographer is to turn his head and look away.
Inaugural ceremony: Tuesday, 6 pm, 1 June 2010
Bengal Gallery of Fine Arts
Bengal Shilpalaya
House 275/F, Road 16 (new)
Sheikh Kamal Sarani
Dhanmandi, Dhaka 1209
The exhibition will remain open until 10 June 2010, daily from 12 – 8 pm

Masterclass

It feels strange to be called a ‘master’ when the ‘students’ are such hugely talented photographers. When it includes the inimitable grandmaster David Burnett in our midst the discomfort is complete.
? Jan Grarup
It was a delight to be in his company again. Though I’ve always enjoyed his images, and we’ve been co-jurors of WPP, this was the first time we’d spent so much time together. The poster for the first ever Chobi Mela in 2000, with his iconic image of the Muktibahini, still hangs on Drik’s corridor. Poor Munem Wasif travelled all the way to Amsterdam only to find his bearded tutor again.
? Sirio Magnabosco
But the pleasure of such company, the energy within those four walls and the sheer joy of seeing such wonderful images, made up for any qualms I might have had. David’s presentation was humbling. It’s candor, its warmth, the enormous breadth of his work and the unquestionable quality of the photography left me breathless.
? David Burnett/Contact Press Images. Design Reza/Drik

The WPP awards for Christoph, C?dric and Rafel that came in yesterday, was a welcome bonus, but an expected one. This was photography at its finest and despite the vagaries of judging and the imperfections of any selection process, photography such as this must surely rise to the surface.
Oh to be a student again!

? C?dric Gerbehaye, Belgium, Agence Vu. Congo in Limbo. General News, 3rd Prize Stories. WPP contest 2007