Artist Shahidul Alam: ‘Photography does things that words cannot do so effectively’

“People hug me in the street. They say: ‘You were so brave!’ I don’t think so.”

Shahidul Alam takes a sip of almond milk, his mellifluous voice resonating through the sunlit sitting room of a mutual friend. “The things I said are not earth-shattering. They are things we should all be saying. They seem remarkable because others are silent. We have a tradition of resistance in Bangladesh. For people not to speak is a problem.”

In August 2018, the photographer, artist, teacher and civil rights activist was arrested, imprisoned and tortured for 107 days by the Dhaka police after criticising his country’s Awami League government in an interview on Al Jazeera. So Alam knows why his compatriots remain silent.

Although Bangladesh is a democracy, its draconian restrictions on freedom of expression are regularly denounced by organisations such as PEN and Amnesty International. Yet Alam, though still on bail, refuses to play it safe. Since his release in November 2018, after a global campaign that included Arundhati Roy, Amal Clooney and Sharon Stone, his photographs, many focused on Bangladesh’s battle for civil rights, have travelled the world, including to the V&A in London and the Rubin Museum in New York.

Born in Dhaka in 1955, Alam went to the UK when he was 17, a year after his country won independence from Pakistan. In Britain, while studying to be a research chemist, he started taking pictures on the side. Always compelled to fight for social justice, he realised “the power of the medium” to “do things that words cannot do so effectively”.

Since then, Alam’s images have seared themselves on the collective retina of south Asia and beyond. Whereas Bangladesh is often viewed as the victim of poverty and natural disasters, Alam spotlights its resilience, courage and inventiveness. When reporting the devastating cyclone of 1988, for example, his shot of a woman cooking on the roof of her flooded hut encapsulated the nation’s refusal to surrender. In 2011, in his tribute to indigenous rights campaigner Kalpana Chakma, who was “disappeared” by the army in 1996, he lasered images of her fellow activists — Kalpana’s Warriors, as the sequence was known — on to straw sleeping mats, tugging his audience into the absent woman’s intimate world. Such intriguing, ambiguous images typify a vision that fuses the political acuity of reportage with the unpredictable flair of art.

His latest project, Singed But Not Burnt, a book published by Kolkata-based gallery Emami Art and accompanied by shows in India and Chicago, proves his political fire is undimmed. Its cover bears “Woman in Ballot Booth” (1991). Captioned “A woman avenges Noor Hossain’s death by casting a vote”, the black and white photograph of the figure marking her paper, head bowed, is Alam’s tribute to an activist murdered by police in 1987 during a protest.

The book’s final pages document “The Cry of the Imprisoned” (2020), an artists’ performance on the Dhaka streets protesting the latest law under which hundreds of writers, artists and journalists have been imprisoned.

Although these images testify to Bangladesh’s “tradition of resistance”, they also map a continuum of repression. Does Alam ever feel the struggle is hopeless? “No,” he replies firmly. “I can see changes in the offing. There is an awakened public in Bangladesh. The middle class was very, very protective of its comfort zone. But the BNP [Bangladesh Nationalist Party, chief opposition to the Awami League] are now standing in the streets and people are gathering around them. There are more and more dissenting voices.”

He pauses, a slight figure in his candy-pink panjabi, immaculately embroidered by his partner, the writer and human rights activist Rahnuma Ahmed. Given the menace, why continue to risk his freedom? “The fact that I’m out here, talking to you, is dependent on the fact that there was a global campaign for my release. Many others were ‘disappeared’ without [anyone] knowing about them.”

Alam’s project Crossfire (2010), present in Singed But Not Burnt, testifies to those cruel fates. These are oblique yet hackle-raising pictures — bullet holes in a muralled wall; a stained, crumpled gamcha (working man’s cloth) used as a blindfold before torture and death. Less oblique is the shot of a camera-wielding crowd — many of them Alam’s own students — photographing the police trying to close down Crossfire when Alam showed it at Drik, the exhibition space and picture library he founded in 1989.

As well as Drik, Alam founded the Pathshala South Asian Media Institute, the region’s renowned photography school; Majority World, a picture agency for photographers from Asia, Africa and Latin America, whose name illustrates Alam’s rejection of western condescension; and Chobi Mela, an international photography festival. In the book, a moving conversation between two of his former students, curator Tanzim Wahab and photographer Munem Wasif, both of whom now have international careers, testify to a teacher who held them “mesmerised”.

Alam’s empathy pulses through every shot in Singed But Not Burnt, from a barefoot ballerina-straight young woman striding across a desolate construction site with a basket of earth on her head, to human traffickers, languid of limb, sharp of eye, on a river boat. “I am not parachuting in to take pictures,” responds Alam when I ask how he evades objectification. “I am photographing our community. It’s my world too.”

His awareness that human choices underpin our economic system has fed his current project: a film about the deaths of migrant workers in the UAE. “Around 3,500 corpses return each year but the Bangladeshi government isn’t talking about it.” Alam’s film will include footage of the workers’ families as well as scenes in Qatar where, he observes, of the reported $220bn spent on staging the 2022 World Cup, “almost none went to the workers”.

“People like you and me — we deprive other people. Somehow we’ve decided the place of the subaltern is to stay where they are. If they’ve been born there, they die there.”

His work illuminates the nuanced reality of people who are so often invisible to those who benefit from them. It’s unlikely the film will make him any more popular with the Bangladesh authorities than the rest of his work. How long can he remain singed but not burnt? “Photographers have to be at the front line,” he replies calmly. “It’s about finding that space where you will feel the heat but stay alive. Martyrs do not make good reporters.”

At Wrightwood 659, Chicago, to July 15, wrightwood659.org, then at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Delhi, from July 17, knma.in