Power and the people: the message of Bangladeshi photographer Shahidul Alam

At the end of the day, it isn’t where I came from. Maybe home is somewhere I’m going and never have been before.

— Warsan Shire

No matter where home may be, it is where we expect to be safe. When award-winning photographer and activist Shahidul Alam was taken from his residence in Dhaka soon after his comments on TV channel Al-Jazeera in support of student-led protests in his country, his ‘home’ became a frontier that was breached. Imprisoned without bail, Alam stands accused, under Section 57 of Bangladesh’s Information and Communication Technology Act, of spreading ‘provocative comments’.

Earlier this year, I saw Alam in a performance trial-piece titled ‘Rehearsing the Witness: The Bhawal Court Case’ at the Dhaka Art Summit. Directed by Zuleikha Chaudhuri, it scrutinised the legitimacy of testimonies based on a historic, identity-oriented court case, exploring vulnerabilities or subjectivities attached to facts. In retrospect, Alam inhabited two parallel universes borne of reality, and in both he gigantically expanded the scope of an effective body politics through the aesthetic of a visual storyteller. His life at this moment (and during the enactment) is indeed a powerful metaphor.

For this reason, he stands for much of what our predicament as ‘citizens’ is today — poised to reassert how vigilance and personal media action are deeply enabling tools that can expose the old guard: those imbricated public institutions scrambling to hold on. It also makes us question who we are: are we operatives, endorsing regimes which present us with half-truths and ephemeral ethical codes of conduct with an illusory sense of control? Alam doesn’t think so, as at no other time in the history of image-making have the poetic/ prophetic thrusts and affects of images been so craved and deployed by a cross-section of society with whom the power of an image now lies. We are today in the realm of the ‘viewer’ as author, inhabiting an expanded citizenry — as witness, memory-keeper, record-bearer and archivist.

Media as enabler

But who is this ‘citizen’ and how have recent articulations in photography or image-making drawn her out? Some historians claim that the notion of the ‘citizen’ emerged from the Enlightenment. However, are the limits on free speech, predicated by universal suffrage and social welfare that mandate our subservience to or affirmation of a system, to be accepted?

Alam suggests not. In a world where education becomes an elite preoccupation, wealth a landlocked claim, and justice a privilege, the ability to share experiences on a similar platform becomes a formidable equaliser.

So, if violence reported against marginalised groups in India has increased over 74% in the last decade, it should compel us to ask whether the escalation has been proportionately addressed in academia, reportage, display practices and curatorial exercises within institutions, both national and regional. It makes us cast an eye on other critical engagements such as ‘Behind the Indian Boom: Inequality and Resistance at the Heart of Economic Growth’, an exhibition curated by documentary-maker Simon Chambers and professor of anthropology Alpa Shah that was on view early this year in the U.K. The display was based on anthropological and social research, and presented images taken by the authors of the book Ground Down by Growth: Tribe, Caste, Class and Inequality in 21st Century India (2018), as well as other academics and photojournalists, with works largely highlighting resource-starved communities. It focused our attention on the value of raw visuals emerging from fieldwork and its relationship to a certain, institutional activism. It highlighted the need for an entrenched encounter between subject and author; a median position from which we the ‘viewers’ can gauge the extent of the malaise.

Debate, not retaliation

Alam’s testimony also suggests that the citizen doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and resistances need more critical attention since they can be crucial drivers of change; of generational shifts that need debates rather than retaliation; acts of collaboration and engagement that purport the need for philosophical and practical evolutionary routes around our socio-political stances, and for us to realise that a traditional ethical mainframe may not be able to easily judge or weigh the contemporary.

This is a progressive politics of vision, which asks others how they see. Which understands subject matter through the eco-system in which it is circulated. Further, it privileges image-discourses of the disenfranchised and the subaltern in order to rouse institutions to think again about how they represent public interest. As a wave of new scholars, activists, lawyers, judges, artists and thinkers unite like never before, this millennium is already being conditioned to a sustained debate around culpability and accountability through activist-driven citizen journalism and dynamic media alliances.

Such engagements have been in focus in South Asia more generally, given the ruptures emanating from language, ethnicity, religion and even nationality — if not cosmopolitan cultures clashing with traditional communities. Independent researcher in Nepal, Diwas K.C., who curated ‘Dalit: A Quest for Dignity’, as part of Nepal Picture Library, asks us to question visibility altogether. He suggests that in certain situations, giving visibility does not intrinsically bolster a situation or oblige a cause. It requires contextual, if not a historical reading in order to forge an arc or trajectory around an ‘experience’. Anything that edits from the thesaurus of images surrounding such events must make us question the ethics of viewing itself — in order to see the layered structures of discrimination and identity politics within images and uncover the exclusion of certain communities from narratives of a country’s past and their continued absence from public spaces.

What Alam, like a stream of other voices, relays in no uncertain terms is that there is immense integrity and value in dialogues and counter-dialogues, enlightening counter-flows, resistances meeting counter-resistances, and investigations of ignored counter-publics. Social changes that are most needed are, therefore, marked by contestation, since they challenge power structures. This also means that the ‘counter-citizen’ has become a vital power broker for sustaining the fabric of society itself, a message broadcast in ‘Rehearsing the Witness’, a message that should allow student-leaders like Umar Khalid to voice discontentment without being physically attacked; a message that needs to be relayed through continual repurposing and dissemination in digital media;

It is hence vital for us to take credence of artist-activists who express the fissures in society and use the primal metaphors of land, wind, water and fire — diminishing resources — as elemental protagonists that need revitalising and not just ‘using’.

And if the planet is asking for justice now through these principal agents, and if they are the key witnesses to atrocities, we certainly need all those investigating voices from the field to tell us the ‘whole truth and nothing but’. Because when they are gagged, we are too; and once their resistance is crushed, the planet will be too.

The writer is Curator, Alkazi Foundation for the Arts, and Founding Editor, PIX.