The sweeping gestures of photography have thrived on extremes. Great things, epic moments, the wretched, the vile, the dispossessed, the celebrated and the trodden, have all found themselves facing the lens. Photography has exalted suffering, celebrated the vain. Quiet moments, reflective ...

29.01.2013[ read full story ]

Festival Director Shahidul Alam talks about the challenges and expectations one faces when running a festival such as Chobi Mela and points out the festival’s uniqueness and beauty.

29.01.2013[ read full story ]

Chobi Mela, the first festival of photography in Asia, is one of the most exciting ventures that Drik has initiated. The first Chobi Mela – International Festival of Photography was held Dec.1999-January 2000. It is the most demographically inclusive photo festival in the world and is held ever...

29.01.2013[ read full story ]

The sign on the whiteboard said “Buy chips”. I couldn’t quite work out why this was so significant in the task list for the festival. Our Slovenian volunteer Barbara explained. With everyone working long hours and Emad at the secretariat being in trouble with his wife. The secretariat had worke...

29.01.2013[ read full story ]

What is about Chobi Mela that makes it special and important? So what makes me come back to Chobi Mela, this pioneering festival for photography in Asia? It is the question that I ask myself, now that I am here in Dhaka setting up both my father’s and my exhibitions. Obvious...

29.01.2013[ read full story ]

I guess I was always enthralled every time photography unfolded its mystery before me. I can clearly recall the day I first watched a slide projector working it’s charisma onto the white wall at our grandmother’s house. I was only three year old then. In those early days of my...

29.01.2013[ read full story ]

I met Shahidul just over 20 years ago, when Chobi Mela was just a twinkle in his Bangladeshi eye. It was another 7 years before it was to become the first photographic festival in a country where photography as a profession hardly existed. We were on a fishing boat in the...

29.01.2013[ read full story ]

When Shahidul invited me to exhibit some of my work at the festival I started by browsing and sifting through my past work to see what would fit best for the theme "Fragility". So I came upon this series of photographs of plants that are recovering in botanical gardens. I re...

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The piles of photos I made for this project were taken under many different circumstances. I started photographing China because I was an architect and I received a fellowship to do a research project there. So the purpose was a very specific one and I was looking for some visual ...

29.01.2013[ read full story ]

This is the coldest winter in Bangladesh since 1971. At The Chobi Mela Buriganga party, most are shrouded in blankets,and wander around the deck with an early morning coffee in one hand and camera in the other. Little sleep has been had, and we are all absorbed in watching the river c...

29.01.2013[ read full story ]

Until March 1st, Brest welcomes the 9th edition of the Pluie d’Images festival. With not less than 30 exhibitions organized around the theme of Transit, five professional photographers will be on display. Holding a Holga, Zhang Xiao brings us to China, discovering the daily life o...

29.01.2013[ read full story ]

Coney Island´s American dream of technologically engineered leisure and spectacle looks slightly forlorn through Peter Granser´s lens, which registers a mix of sweet smiles and emptiness, dry humor and melancholy that he refers to as its “wonderful morbid charm.” If you know anything about ...

29.01.2013[ read full story ]

A small village in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, Gulmarg is located about fifty kilometers from Srinagar, the summer capital of Jammu and Kashmir, and twenty kilometers from the Pakistani border. “It’s the far side of the world, but nothing is made to seem exotic. Marion Gambin n...

29.01.2013[ read full story ]

Them, the citizens, the workers… Each one of them has his own ordinary life, working 9 to 5, taking vacations, feeding kids… They've been watching their homeland undergo a great change in the last 30 years. Now they have to face the old traditions and customs and the effect on their lifestyle...

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“Photographing farmers has become increasingly urgent because very soon there will be none left. Old and lonely, without heir to their way of life, the farmers cannot pass on their experience to the next generation. They live on a family farm built by their ancestors, a fertile granite w...

29.01.2013[ read full story ]

“My documentary-style photographs offer a subjective narrative to viewers. In my series Historical Places, I look at the superposition of two separate temporal strata. These images of industrial landscapes serve show what these historic places look like today.”

29.01.2013[ read full story ]