the art of storytelling at chobi mela iv

beyond boundaries

The mood was festive in the capital of Bangladesh

Despite the protests and blockades that left Dhaka air heavy with uncertainty, here people were singing and dancing to a brass-band playing traditional folk songs for the opening rally of Chobi Mela IV, the international festival of photography. The celebrations, in fact, continued till midnight with a boat-trip across the Buriganga on opening night. The party returned to Dhaka’s shores at six o’clock the next morning, bleary-eyed, and still excited spent most of the night dancing on the deck.
With more than 1,000 pictures in 49 exhibitions assembled from 23 countries, the festival was remarkable by any standards.An initiative of Drik, Chobi Mela is currently the only festival in the world to run a mobile version. Rickshaw-vans with samples of the festival travelled to schools, football pitches and bazaars, bringing world-class photography to people who would otherwise never see the inside of a photo gallery. This year’s theme was boundaries. Photojournalists and artists dealt with the concept in different ways. Some looked at geographic boundaries, such as the Indian Swapan Nayak in ‘Refugees in their Own Land’, pictures about ethnic conflict and displaced people in northeast India.
Others saw boundaries as social barriers. The Bangladeshi Shehzad Noorani’s collection, ‘The Daughters of Darkness’ brought marginalised sex-workers into focus at Shilpakala, the National Academy of Fine and Performing Arts. At Drik gallery, Abir Abdullah of Bangladesh portrayed religious, commercial and social boundaries in shots of rivers and people. And Bangladeshi Shehab Uddin highlighted the barriers he overcame as a newcomer to Nepal in ‘These Strangers are Family Now’, at the Russian Centre of Science and Culture.

But the festival was made distinctive through the evening lecture sessions. In the first week, festival goers gathered every day at the Goethe Institute to hear people from various backgrounds discuss photography.
Despite a schedule that had to be kept flexible because of the uncertainty about who had managed to get into the country, who had to leave early and flights not arriving on time, there were at least 17 international participants ranging from British lawyer Rupert Grey to Australian Magnum photographer Trent Parke.
Chobi Mela is one of the few photography festivals that offer such an intimate ambience. As well as offering practical advice on issues such as copyright, speakers gave the audience a glimpse into the lives of photographers.
Unlike the more glitzy affairs at Perpignan or the World Press Awards in Amsterdam, Chobi Mela afforded a rare, intimate opportunity for the public to question the questioners, to hold photojournalists to account and gauge whether they deserved the kudos they get from doing their job.
As festival director Shahidul Alam put it: ‘When a lot of these people speak in other forums, they’re not interactive. They stay with their superstar-status. Here, they were questioned. There was a dynamic between the audience and them. Some then became defensive. The fact that they, the superstars, are never confronted by these questions makes them that much more sensitive to any sort of critique.’
The Mela continued despite the tense political situation in Dhaka, which had brought many other parts of the country to a complete standstill.

In the middle of Contact Press Images president Robert Pledge’s presentation, Alam suddenly took the stage declared said: ‘I’m sorry to interrupt, but I’ve got a very important announcement to make.’ We’ve had unconfirmed reports the government has sent the military onto the streets, with instructions to shoot-on-sight if there’s any agitation. I think we’d better let people start getting home.’ But interest still refused to wane. Nobody was deterred by the announcement. On the contrary, viewers faithfully continued to turn up in droves. The sessions were as fascinating as being invited into somebody’s home. Through detailed, informal presentations of personal projects, the lines between heart, mind and art became blurred as intrigued viewers discovered that the processes behind photographs were as powerful, as significant, as the final image itself.
Robert Pledge noted: ‘It’s a long time since I’d seen so many exciting statements, not just photographs.’ It was the level of commitment and honesty and passion that everyone showed that really impressed me.’
A highlight of the show was the work of photojournalist Trent Parke. His exhibition, ‘Minutes to Midnight’, at the Bengal Gallery, made clear that the cricketer-turned-photographer is a spectacular artist. His vivid descriptions of his 30-something year-old life endeared viewers to him. It revealed how he gave up his ambition to become a professional cricketer at 18 for photography, and took a job at an Australian daily paper. One day he walked out due to editorial constraints and went on a road-trip around Australia with his then partner and now wife, Narelle. Their journey was full of highs and lows, from his marriage proposal to a disastrous expedition which saw their 4×4 plunge into a lake, and left the pair scrambling to save treasured negatives.
Using scrapbooks, old family pictures and photographs of his journey, Trent presented a deeply personal portrait of his life, his family, his love, and his two young boys, one of whom was just weeks old when he left Sydney for Dhaka.

‘It’s important to push the boundaries of what’s been done before,’ Trent tells us. He lives and breathes his craft—from the moment he wakes up until he goes to sleep at night he is focused on his work. The audience was spellbound by the story of this storyteller. When his slide-show eventually came to ‘Minutes to Midnight’, the black-and-white images with their other-worldly quality wavering between the material and the spiritual now seemed to be of a different, magical dimension.
Indian photojournalist Pablo Bartholomew also captivated the audiences by telling his story of dropping out of school at 17 and taking to drugs. Before long, he was documenting the ‘outcasts’ of Delhi slums: drug-addicts and transvestites, hippies and street-performers. He declared: ‘It gives me pleasure and satisfaction to know that I followed my instincts to engage with the fringe elements of society at a time when no photographer, artist or filmmaker was interacting with these people in South Asia.’ It was the birth of a hugely successful career which eventually led him to cover top political Indian leaders as well as major international news stories such as the Bhopal disaster, winning him his second World Press Photo award.
Afterwards, celebrated Norwegian photographer Morten Krogvold said: ‘When Trent and Pablo Bartholomew gave their wonderful speeches, for the first time in a long time, I was inspired by photography and I sat and wrote about UV lights.’
This intimacy, the story behind the story, was the attraction behind ‘Contact/s 30: The Art of Photojournalism’ at the National Museum.

Curated by Robert Pledge, it featured 30 contact sheets made since 1976. It was the first time people in Bangladesh saw the iconic images taken by photographers such as Annie Leibowitz and Sebastiao Salgado. Pledge commented: ‘As the world has now fully entered the digital age, it is doubtful that a show of this type will exist in thirty years. Contact sheets…are fast disappearing, destined to become artifacts of photographic history along with tin plates and glass negatives.’ The contact sheets are like a filmstrip of the photographer’s assignment, providing a cinematic narrative of the situation they face. Like a fine artist’s sketchbook, viewers got to see how the photojournalists reach their chosen pictures. Boundaries between forms shift, as behind-the-scenes frames are displayed as exhibits in their own right, equal in status to the final iconic image.
But Pledge’s presentation allowed for even deeper insights. The agency that he works for includes the ‘maverick’ photographer Kenneth Jarecke, who took the World Press Award winning picture of an Iraqi soldier who had turned to ash at the wheel of his vehicle after being incinerated by a US bomb during an attack on retreating forces leaving Kuwait. Out of the entire contact sheet, there were just two frames of this man. Jarecke was working with two cameras at the time, and the earlier frames had been shot with another camera body in black-and-white, but he wisely decided to shoot these extra frames in colour.
The haunting image was first shunned by agencies such as Associated Press who had taken the decision to self-censor, apprehending themas too controversial and uncomfortable for the ‘safe’ versions of the invasion more commonly seen in the Western press. Only a couple of papers, including the London Observer decided to print the image on March 10 1991. Even then, it was ignored by the American press, until Jarecke wrote about it himself in American Photo Magazine’s July/August 1991 issue.

Now, following the second invasion of Iraq, photographs have again exposed what lies hidden beneath the propaganda of Britain and America’s governments which have tried to suppress truths about the brutality of their actions. This time, the media isn’t as complicit. The world was left reeling after images of torture and abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, saved by US soldiers as ‘trophies’, were flashed on television screens this year. Certainly there was a distinctly critical edge to the evening meetings.
Bolton University lecturer Dave Clark spoke about Digital Image markets and the Majority World. According to Dave, the Getty’s and Corbis’s, super-agencies with particular agendas, have transformed photography into a sellers’ market, lending a new sense of commercial urgency which has led to stereotypical images of the ‘poor, starving’, and subservient, south. As a result photojournalism became more about money and less about looking for the picture that others wouldn’t find. Images of the majority world became dominated by negative, disaster-prone representations taken by Western photographers.
This was the reason Drik was set up, and Clark himself became interested in questioning this attitude after visiting Bangladesh in the 1980s. He questioned how he, a white Westerner, was representing the country compared with local photographers.

But despite festivals such as Chobi Mela, or organisations like Drik, many Western photographers are still ignorant of how good most of the photographers from the rest of the world are.
Dave has worked with photography students in Dalian, China, and in Bolton, England. Both sets were asked to submit photojournalistic projects. Without telling them whose work was being shown, they were asked if they thought the pictures that had been taken by Chinese or British photographers. While nearly all the British students got the answers wrong, nearly all the Chinese students got the answers right.
But the evening sessions also saw hierarchies between minority and majority worlds played out.
Photojournalist Chris Rainier, of the National Geographic, presented his work on ‘Ancient Marks’, a selection of images of ‘tribal’, or indigenous, groups of people in Africa covered in ritual tattoos. The black-and-white images were technically striking. Compelling, even. And it must have been hard work for a white Canadian male who could easily have been denied access into such communities. Some found the images offensive. Contemporary African societies were exhibited as historical objects in a museum, photographs carrying Victorian undertones of the exotic, dark continent. Shockingly fascinating.
But when it came to critical questions, there were only two. He had said he ‘loved’ the fact that he went from ‘disappearing’ cultures to modern societies within six days on assignments, so someone asked Chris what his definition of ‘modernity’ was. Another questioned the exhibitionist way the people had been presented, with little insight into the culture that had produced the tattoos or stories of the human beings behind the marks.
Arrows of rage were also fired at a little-known Phillipino photographer, Richard Atrero De Guzman, known as Bahaghari, who had photographed indigenous, tattooed Butbut peoples in his country. Although the photographs were less shocking than Ranier’s work, and Guzman had tried to engage more with a culture, he became the target of people’s anger. They asked him probing questions such as: why didn’t you get naked yourself if you wanted your subjects to be undressed? How would you feel if your mother or sister was photographed like that? What makes you think you have the right to go in and photograph ‘these’ people? He answered questions as honestly and as gracefully as he could. Later, he was reported to have said he wouldn’t return to this subject and was going to revise his aims and goals in photography.

But then the representation revealed power structures within the industry: here was a white photographer from a major Western magazine regarded by many as the pinnacle of photography, but he was too unapproachable, too intimidating for criticism. On the other hand, a lesser known, young Asian photojournalist wasn’t. He was vulnerable, and the audience knew it.
But while the sessions became, at times, uncomfortable, the formation of new friendships, the sense of camaraderie and the bonds between people who had worked together for years was touching. Morten Krogvold had already stolen the hearts of students at Pathshala, the South Asian Institute of Photography. They were in tears when his workshop ended.
After showing his film about a Norwegian director who produces Samuel Beckett plays in prisons, he astounded audiences by announcing that two students of Pathshala, the South Asian Institute of Photography, had been selected to show work at the prestigious Northern Lights festival in Norway. Pathshala principal Shahidul Alam, who founded the school, was invited to the inauguration. Morten described how Alam had become a good friend of his and how Bangladesh had become so dear to him. He said: ‘In Europe, I charge $1,000 for a workshop. But I come here and do them for free.’ He declared: ‘Some of the students here are the most talented I’ve seen. They have a hunger for learning.’
As he left the platform, Morten and Shahidul gave each other a bear-hug. Morten’s students grabbed him on stage to adorn him with their gifts of a lungi, shirt, and feed him a cake, declaring ‘We love you Morten’.

Through the sessions, people in Bangladesh also got to see exciting projects such as InSight Out, of Thailand, which are often ignored in the mainstream press. Presented by Yumi Goto, the photos were by 119 children from Aceh, Thailand, who had lost their families, friends, homes and schools in the Tsunami and were given point-and-shoot cameras to help process their feelings and emotions.
Yumi said: ‘When we started doing this, people said, ‘this is ridiculous. Do they need a camera and film at a time like this? They need food and shelter’. But the pictures came out very well, reflecting the maturity of the children. And they showed sides of the disaster that the Western, mainstream press did not cover, partly because the photographers had a unique access which was denied, or not sought, by Western agencies.
Emerging photographers got practical advice from the sessions, like where to get work published. Rupert Grey, Robert Pledge and Philipino historian Jose Maria M Cruz discussed copyright issues and raised the idea of a ‘collective memory’ through a shared archive.
The 22-year-old photojournalist Cristobal Trejo came all the way from Mexico independently to take part in Chobi Mela. His project ‘Windows Experience’ viewed boundaries as a bridge between different worlds.
In introducing Trejo, Alam recalled a story where he mistakenly thought he was about to be robbed in Mexico. In fact, his taxi driver had taken him to a lonely village so he could find a translator and tell him how much he enjoyed his work.
Alam said: ‘I salute your country, where photography is appreciated so widely.’ Drik, Chobi Mela and Pathshala have also been working towards a similar aim in Bangladesh, by making the normally closed-off world of photography accessible to all parts of society.

One of the last sessions ended with a short film based on a train journey directed by Joseph Joshy of Drik India. Alam also presented his own work on the Tsunami, full of poignant, powerful images.
There was a slide-show on the final night: behind-the-scenes at Chobi Mela. The audience loved it. Many of them were watching themselves. But it was also a testament to the hours, days and weeks of hard work the cast of Chobi Mela, including printers, painters, joiners and rickshaw-wallahs, had put in to make it such a fantastic event.
Chobi Mela is sure to continue its unstoppable rise, pushing Bangladesh to the fore of world photography. It’s groundbreaking for a country like Bangladesh, where photography is not taught at major institutions such as Dhaka University, the Institute of Fine Arts. The organisers seemingly had bottomless reservoirs of energy. From the tense political situation to battling obstructive staff at the National Museum who tried to stop them from working all night to get Contact/s 30 up, the people behind Chobi Mela proved what vision and determination can achieve. Chobi Mela did not receive any government aid.
By going to Chobi Mela’s evening sessions, even people with no background in photography learnt how photography is more than just artistic or technical competence. It’s a way to reach the human spirit.
As the great Spanish artist Picasso had said: ‘The camera is the photographer’s problem!’

Fariha Karim is a Bangladeshi writer-reporter based in Glasgow, Scotland. She has been working for the past two years as a journalist for a local newspaper in Greenock on the West Coast of Scotland

The mood was festive in the capital of Bangladesh Despite the protests and blockades that left Dhaka air heavy with uncertainty, here people were singing and dancing to a brass-band playing traditional folk songs for the opening rally of Chobi Mela IV, the international festival of photography. The celebrations, in fact, continued till midnight with…