In 1993, Shahidul Alam, a Bangladeshi photographer, wrote a letter to the managing director of the World Press Photo awards, asking her to consider changing the name of this renowned photographic association to Western Press Photography. It seemed evident to Alam that, although the photos he had seen were extraordinary, the World Press jury members and most of the photographers chosen as their awardees did not represent the majority of the world – Asians, Africans and Latin Americans. In an interview on Iranian television, Alam explained that when he visited the touring exhibition he was galled to see how casually a Western model, awarding Western photojournalists, was projecting a universal umbrella. The director decided to call Alam, making an equally audacious suggestion: would he bring the exhibition to Dhaka in a month? Three weeks later, the World Press Photo exhibition came to Bangladesh for the first time, displayed in Alam's own Drik gallery. The paint on the walls was still wet when the first viewers were let in. Alam went on to become the first Southasian to chair the international jury of World Press.
Few are capable of such spontaneous moments of belief, of balancing their ideological positions with practical decision-making, and even fewer can make resources and manpower materialise through their deep roots in both regional and international networks. Alam has become a household name in the photography community because of a unique combination of intimacy, tenacity and vision, and his relentless drive to turn small singular successes into structural change. Alam's desire for Southasia and the global South to be reflected in the rosters of the international media and the art world is slowly being realised. Lars Boering, the current managing director of World Press, has seen, firsthand, Alam's persistent rhetoric at international forums against the silencing of the local witness in the global media. As he said in a phone interview from Amsterdam, "His [Alam's] phrase 'majority world' was an eye opener for everybody because there is no argument against it. This argument has stood for twenty years."
At the time of writing, Alam languishes in jail, detained purportedly for inciting violence through his broadcasts on Facebook during the student protests for road safety in Dhaka. Given his long career as a photographer and documentarian of most major events affecting Bangladesh, it is hardly surprising that Alam was also covering the extraordinary activism of the youth at close quarters. In Bangladesh, it is Alam's material interventions and constant writing in the press, his vigilance against injustice, which makes him known to the wider public. There, it is not his exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou in Paris or the Museum of Modern Art in New York that matter, but the fact that he played a role in bringing email to his fellow citizens, was at the forefront of grasping the digital revolution, has opened exhibition after exhibition at Drik gallery pointing to taboo subjects and human-rights violations in Bangladesh, and that he counts himself as a social activist first and an artist second.
Alam has written to successive Bangladeshi prime ministers, fearlessly spelling out the consequences of their lapses in judgment and seeking justice. In 1992, hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshis gathered at Suhrwardy Uddayan, at what Alam called "the site of liberation… for a denunciation of war criminals". But on television there was no sign of the agitating masses. So Alam wrote to the BNP government protesting "their appropriation of Bangladesh Television; a media that is paid for and rightfully belongs to the people". His righteous indignation was worded as a reminder to then Prime Minister Khaleda Zia, of her responsibilities to "a citizen of a nation with a democratically elected parliament". Alam's epistles are effective because he combines a historical viewpoint with an unfailing ethical compass, and, most importantly, a personal mode of address. This method of writing, with one eye to the future and the other to the past, all the while having both feet firmly planted among the people, is what makes the vast corpus of articles Alam has produced a parallel, personal history of Bangladesh.