Recommended to Eduardo by:?Ginger
Painful to read. Troubling… but beautiful and inspiring as well. Alam comes across as deeply bitter, but unlike the rest of us he uses that to make this world a better place. Through his photography, his words, his actions, he brings truths to light. Beauty, too.
This is not a coffee table book. It’s not even mostly a photography book. It’s … autobiography? Geopolitical venting? Self-congratulation? Those but also much more. From my privileged first-world position it’s difficult to understand this book in context, to know where Alam is coming from. It’s easy to accept his perspective, to be temporarily outraged, and ultimately to do nothing because the third world (?Majority World?, as Alam insightfully calls it) is so remote.
Despite that, despite Alam’s occasionally difficult prose, I think this is a book worth reading and absorbing. A perspective that may be new to many of us. A reminder of so much that still needs to be fixed in this world, and that there are people fighting to fix it.