1. TOMHATLESTAD
Photographer advocates social change
MADELENE RYAN
“THE public no longer trusts
photography, but pictures have always
been manipulated. We have just
forgotten the majority of manipulation
is not what is in the frame, but what is
left out.”
So says internationally renowned
photographer Dr Shahidul Alam, speak-
ing at a special public discussion on the
role of ‘the visual’in communication for
social change.
For more than 30 years, Dr Alam has
used photography to advocate for social
change.
Native to the slums of Bangladesh,
Dr Alam was profoundly influenced by
poverty and inequality, pursuing pho-
tography to challenge oppression and
imperialism.
Dr Alam is credited with helping
Bangladesh have the highest number of
documentary photographers in the world
and has helped several Bangladeshi pho-
tographers gain international acclaim by
helping to ‘break the elitist culture of the
arts’.
“I wanted to take art to the people,”
Alam says.
“I invited some tradesmen friends of
mine to an opening and they declined
because they felt they were excluded by
the arts community, thinking they didn’t
have anything to wear or [know any-
thing] about ‘culture’.”
“So I took my next exhibition out of
the galleries and to the Bangladeshi peo-
ple,” he says.
“By boat, on foot, we set up anywhere
and everywhere...by really opening my
work to the public, I hope I helped begin
to remove some stigma about who the
arts belong to.”
After obtaining a PhD in chemistry,
Alam decided to turn photography from
his hobby into his life’s work.
Alam established the award-winning
Drik Picture Library, the Bangladesh
Photographic Institute and is the direc-
tor of Chobi Mela, a biennial interna-
tional festival of photography.
Most recently he founded the Majority
World, a photo agency dedicated to
providing a platform for non-western
photographers.
As a widely celebrated photographer,
Alam has received numerous awards and
praise, but claims his greatest achieve-
ments are the people he has trained and
the lives he has transformed.
“I’ve taken a photo of someone and
had their family come to me after they
died and asked for a copy, as it was the
only photo ever taken of them,” he says.
“Our world of flesh and blood is not
of words, but of images.”
Despite his many achievements,
things have not always gone smoothly
throughout Dr Alam’s career.
In June 2009, the Indian Border
Security Force detained him while he
was working on a project based on the
river Brahmaputra.
He was released after an international
campaign advocated his release, but is
yet to speak publicly on the experience.
Dr Alam has ignored the
disparagement of authorities, continuing
to photograph daily struggles against
corrupt government and poverty with
relative success.
The police sparked nationwide pro-
tests in 2010 by closing down his
‘Crossfire’exhibition in Dhaka moments
before it opened.
The exhibition examined the alleged
extrajudicial killings and torture car-
ried by the Rapid Action Battalion in
Bangladesh.
The police barricade around Drik
Picture Library where the exhibition
was held was removed after Dr Alam’s
lawyers served legal notice on the
government.
While Alam says he is no anarchist,
controversy and challenges against cor-
ruption regularly feature as his driving
forces.
He says he understands why pho-
tography is such an effective protest
medium, trying to reach beyond intel-
lectuals and politicians.
“The written word is undermining all
other practices of communication, being
the only defined, accepted form of lit-
eracy,” Alam says.
“Academia is excluding areas where
textual literacy is low. Writing is effec-
tive in giving fact, but not good at giving
emotions in a broad sense. It is impor-
tant to remember in whose hands the
media is in.”
Unlike many purist photographers,
Dr Alam thinks some of photography’s
most powerful moments come from
advertising.
“Photographs are used to massage the
truth,” he says.
“The power of the image to short-
circuit receptor resistance is what makes
images both powerful and dangerous.”
Dr Alam visited Brisbane in August
as part of a worldwide tour promoting
the release of his book, My Journey as
a Witness, the first of a series of 40 vol-
umes to be published over the next 10
years documenting his work and travel
experiences.
CELEBRATED: Dr Alam said “Our world of flesh and blood is not of words, but of images.” He has transformed lives through his photography.
TYNE HAMILTON
ABORIGINAL languages may cease
to exist in the next 10-30 years if
policy is not made to stop Australian
becoming a ‘linguistic graveyard’,
according to Aboriginal lawyer and
Director of the Cape York Institute for
Policy and Leadership Noel Pearson.
Mr Pearson told the 2011 Griffith
Lecture that the Australian Human
Rights Commission’s Social Justice
report predicted that without inter-
vention, Indigenous language knowl-
edge would cease to exist.
Before colonisation there was 250
distinct Indigenous languages and
600 dialects, but most of these are no
longer spoken.
“If Indigenous languages and cul-
tures are not saved from complete
extinction the well-being of our people
will never be achieved,” Mr Pearson
said.
“We’ve allowed the decline of
Indigenous languages so precipitously
in recent decades, in particular when
we could have been doing very sub-
stantial things to turn things around.
“Very good linguistic work has
been done in the past but those efforts
in my view on the part of universities
have got to be reinvigorated,” he said.
Ghil’ad Zuckerman, Professor of
Linguistics of Endangered Languages
at Adelaide University, said 94 per
cent of Indigenous languages were
either dead or dying.
“If you look at the tendency today,
out of 6000 languages worldwide we
are losing too many languages.
“We might end up in 100 years with
600 languages; 90 percent will die,”
Professor Zuckerman said.
“Out of the 250 languages 223 years
ago (in Australia), only 15 are alive
and kicking, in the sense that they are
spoken by all age groups,” he said.
Mr Pearson said there was not
a day that went by that he did not
have some sense of real dread about
the future of his people’s language,
Guugu Yimidhirr.
“The heritage of our part of the
world is in danger of disappearing
not only from the lives of people but
also by being incompletely recorded,
and we Aboriginal Australians don’t
know how to stop it,” Mr Pearson
said.
“We’ve probably only recorded less
than 1 per cent of the original names
(of places and landmarks) and when
we think about those original names,
they are hundreds of thousands of
years old.
“They have been the names that
have graced those places of the
Australian landscape for millennium
and yet we as a country have not
stepped up to our responsibility to
ensure they shall never pass from the
memory of the nation,” he said.
Mr Pearson said there were many
things that could and should be done.
Firstly, allAustralians had to accept
that it was not inevitable that we lose
Indigenous Aboriginal heritage.
He said it was a crucial national
responsibility that assistance and all
efforts were put into motion enabling
Indigenous communities to revive
their dialects by distributing and
sharing their languages with each
other.
Action needed to save our endangered languages
CHRISSTACEY/GRIFFITHUNIVERSITY
‘LINGUISTIC GRAVEYARD’: Noel Pearson spoke at The 2011 Griffith
Lecture on preserving Indigenous heritage.
NEWS SOURCE
“If Indigenous
languages and
cultures are
not saved from
complete extinction
the well-being of
our people will
never be achieved”
NOEL PEARSON
www.thesource.griffith.edu.auSource
The
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