As we’ve stated on this blog before, Mahmud is one of the most established photographers that Bangladesh has to offer, and with a long trail of successful publications behind him, supported by a dozen of international development agencies, his work is one you want to know and watch.

He’s launching a new book, entitled “Every Day is Another Day”, which according to its cover, is a historical look back at some of his best black and white work. Mahmud normally has these events at his home, if you’re interested in coming please RSVP by phone or e-mail first. The details:

Flat 4B; House 2D;
Road 73G; Gulshan 2; Dhaka.

Feb 06, 2010, Saturday
3 pm – 6 pm

phone: 01715 75 94 63
mahmudmap@yahoo.co.uk

Mosque today
Photography – Architecture – History
04-18.January2010 – Sun – Thur. 10.00-19.00
Inauguration on Monday 04.01.20010 at 17.00

PHOTO EXHIBITION: Mosques in Germany by Wilfried Dechau, Stuttgart/Germany

Approximately 3.5 million Muslims are currently living in Germany and since the 70s almost 2600 Islamic sacral buildings have been created all over the country. German mosques today are symbolizing a decades-long history of immigration but also it’s omissions. They demonstrate the presence and self-confidence of Muslim immigrants in Germany: We are building because we want to stay! This unsettles the way the majority of Germans sees itself and the way it is seen by the Islamic minority, stimulation debate on the position of Muslims within Germany society and the importance accorded them by the majority. The Stuttgart based photographer Wilfried Dechau has travelled through Germany, not only to take pictures of mosques buildings and their interior architecture but also of their socio-political context

PHOTO EXHIBITION: Contemporary Mosques of Bangladesh by Hasan Saifuddin Chandan/Bangladesh

The most famous mosques of Dhaka are the ones from the Mughal and pre-Mughal period but who takes attention on the beautiful new sacral buildings influenced by the architecture of the 50s, 60s and later modern architectural trends. Renowned photographer Hasan Saifuddin Chandan not only captured the structure and interior design of these buildings in his photographic lenses but also the different spheres of life which is linked with mosques today.

PHOTO DOCUMENTATION: Historical Mosques of Bangladesh by Babu Ahmed/Bangladesh

Bangladesh has a rich heritage of Mosque architecture. Erection of Mosque started in Bengal just after the arrival of the Muslims in 1204 CE .The Historical Mosques of Bangladesh could be divided in three major part, on the basis of their architectural style. They are – 1.Mosques of Sultani Period (1204 CE-1576 CE) 2. Mosques of Mughal Period (1576 CE – 1757 CE) 3. Mosques of Colonial Period (1757 CE- 1947 CE). The TRADITIONAL PHOTO GALLERY (TPG) gathered examples of each style in this exhibition. Most of these monuments are nowadays in a quite poor and neglected condition and need urgently preservation and restoration. Babu Ahmed founder of the TRADITIONAL PHOTO GALLERY (TPG) aims to uphold and present these mosques to the world through his photo documentation on historical mosques of Dhaka

VIRTUAL PHOTO EXHIBITION: Architecture and mosques in Bangladesh by Saif Ul Haque/Bangladesh

This will be a digital presentation of few selected contemporary mosques in Bangladesh designed by architects. Prominent architect Saif Ul Haque will present the different aspects of mosques from his architectural perspective which will contain plans, designs, photographs and more information on mosques in the context of planning and realization. Digital presentation will run Sun-Thur 10.00-19.00.

Bangladesh rarely makes any ‘top ten’ lists worldwide, but an often asked question comes more along the following lines: ‘Since I’m in Bangladesh, what are the top ten things I should see?’ Here’s a suggestion list to get you started:

You’ve newly arrived in Bangladesh and you’re amazed at the colour and the energy that this country possesses. Each day is a flowing reel of potential images, bursting with human energy. So what should you try and capture in the camera?

Here are some composition tips for getting your viewers ‘into your frame.’ For the full session, you’ll need to come to the training session held on these topics at the Nordic Club next Monday 2 February, see end for more details.

STRONGER COMPOSITIONS MAKES FOR STRONGER PHOTOGRAPHY
Get closer, get intimate – wide angles versus telephotos
One of the biggest limitations of great photography is weak legs. To create a sense of place inside your images you need to be inside that place, and preferably as close as possible. Do not use a telephoto to compensate for getting close to a subject, unless there is some kind of compositional element you desire, or you’re trying to create a candid photograph while remaining unnoticed. You’ve got to move around when you shoot, use your legs, stand on things, bend down and get different angles. A camera, held only at eye level, will produces only eye-level pictures, but it’s best to mix things up as much as possible.

The Rule of Thirds
Imagine a tic-tac-toe box and try composing along those lines with vertical or horizontal lines. Images that have the horizon in the center or faces placed in the center of the photograph deflate the potential visual impact of a photograph that positions the elements on a rule-of-thirds.

Light, the essential ingredient
Good light will help you get that magic shot, so consider that before, during and after your shoot. The best times of day to shoot are for the few hours before dawn, and for the few hours before dusk. If you must shoot at mid-day, position your subjects in a way that the contrast is not too high.

WHAT TO SHOOT?
People and Bangladesh
In Bangladesh, there’s a fantastic opportunity for you to capture amazing photographs of people. If you’re not comfortable shooting people now, start with children. Women have an especially unique opportunity in Bangladesh to photograph other women.

Colour
Dhaka, one of the most frenetic cities on Earth, is actually quite a pleasurable place to go out and take photographs. Outside the city, Bangladesh is an overwhelmingly rural country beset with rivers and so rivers and fields are an integral part of the Bangladeshi existence. These provide good themes for the travel photographer and hence the challenge will be to be in the right places at the right times.

EDIT, EDIT AND EDIT SOME MORE
On Camera
I use two editing processes in my work. The first is ‘on camera’ editing, where I will go through what I’ve shot in a day and delete images that just don’t speak up as loudly as the others.

On Screen
The second edit comes ‘on screen.’ Take your photographs home and if you’re a Mac user like me, rate them so you can quickly discover what your best photographs are. Start getting objective about your photos by pretending that you’re another person viewing them.

For your audience
When showing your images, do remember that ‘less is more.’ I can think of nothing more boring than seeing 300 photos of my friend’s vacation in wherever, half of which were just a different angle on the same thing.

What’s the story?
Storytelling is an art as old as humankind. Ask yourself, what’s the story behind my photos? Ask yourself why somebody would be interested in these things, and what would they have to learn from what you have to show them. In this way, we start drawing out a series of images that communicate something.

The Perfect Frame Part 2: Composition Tips click the photo for full-size preview
Monday, February 2; Nordic Club Hse 18, Rd 55; 18.30 to 20.00; Tk1,500 each. Attendance will be limited to 15 students so register now. If you’re not an expat club card holder then give me a call at 01714 361 173, and we’ll get your name on the list at the gate.

To register, drop me an e-mail at joybangla.info AT gmail.com. Provide your name and phone number and I’ll send you a confirmation.

If you’d like to hear about events like this in future, click here to subscribe to the Joybangla.Info website. You will receive e-mails when a new entry, event, or any tidbit of interesting information is released via this website.

~photos by Mikey Leung and Belinda Meggitt~

We’ve received some mixed reviews over the above photographic video presentation, which we’ve shown to some members of the Bangladesh tourism industry. Some people love the images and the music, while others have told us some of the images portray a side of Bangladesh that should remain hidden. We now leave it to you, our audience, to tell us what you think?

PS: Youtube’s encoding filters have changed the alignment of the music and frames, plus the quality of the photography has fallen significantly in the transition.. but that’s the deal you get with Youtube. So, that’s why the music doesn’t line up 100 per cent properly with the frames, despite our efforts to make them do so in the first place.

Click here for the full size flyer.

Over 50 different indigenous societies live in Bangladesh, scattered around country. Among them, their female members are perhaps some of the people most excluded from the rest of society, in terms of education, health care and government resources. Mahmud, of MAP Photo Agency, has photographed these populations for the last decade. This exhibition of his work, co-hosted by ActionAid and the Bangladesh Indigenous People’s Forum brings their faces to the foreground. We encourage you to visit the exhibition and learn more about the true diversity Bangladesh holds.

Venue:

Drik Gallery
House 58, Road 15A (New),
Dhanmondi Residential Area, Dhaka, Bangladesh
Tel: (880-2) 9120125, 8123412, 8112954

Dates: August 7-13, 2008
Hours: 1500-2000 every day.

Click on the image or here to see the full flyer.

Have you been stuck searching for the brighter side of Bangladesh in pictures? Search no more.

Our photography (Belinda Meggitt and Mikey Leung) is now on sale as gift cards or postcards. Special edition prints are up for grabs too—contact us. We’ll show you the beautiful, the bold and the brazen side of Bangladesh that you may have yet to see.

Best of all, 10 percent of proceeds are being donated to The Dhaka Project.

The cards are available for purchase at the following fine shopping venues:

• Jatra, 60 Kamal Ataturk Avenue, Gulshan-Banani Bridge above Aranya
• Word and Pages, 125 Gulshan Avenue, close to Gulshan 2
• Ideas Manzil, House 19, Road 79, Gulshan 2
• Mermaid Cafe, Cox’s Bazaar beachside
• Bishaud Bangla, Mehedibagh, Chittagong

For viewings or delivery by the Joybangla rickshaw:

E-mail us: joybangla [DOT] info [AT] gmail.com or use the contact form.

Click on the image to see more from Russell John.

The Bangladeshi Photographers group recently completed a Cyclone Sidr fundraising exhibition, which presented a mix of amateur and professional photography at the Russian Cultural Centre last week. The exhibition has now moved to another venue (details below) but for those who may not able to make it, I managed to speak with some of the photographers about some of my favourites from the show.

The BP group is unique in that many of them have come together via the internet—they are currently sharing their images in an ever increasing pool of quality photography of Bangladesh, which is freely available for all to see at Flickr. Click here to see more of the group’s pictures. You’ll find a mixed bag—some are amateurs with a a real talent, others are just out to have fun with their cameras and explore.

The above image is by self-professed “IT Guy” Russell John. You can hear the story of this image and a few other favourites by following the link below and by listening to the podcast:

[display_podcast]

M R Hasan’s “Road Workers” photo.

Moniruzzaman’s “Creator of the Earth” photo.

Next venue’s details:
Venue: Chobir Haat (opposite of Institute of Fine Arts, Shahbag)
Time: 11 AM to 8 PM
Date: 1st February 2008 to 3rd February 2008

Click on the image to see it in full size.

The Bangladeshi Photographers group is holding a Cyclone Sidr fundraising exhibition until January 31 at the Russian Cultural Centre in Dhanmondi.

What is most impressive about this event is not only quality of the images but by the collaboration of the photographers involved. We’ll be watching this group closely at Joybangla.info.

More of the group’s photography is available at Flickr.

This local villager is one of the benefactors of Green Hill’s gravity irrigation system. His village was fully outfitted with running drinking water and is one of Green Hill’s earliest success stories. Green Hill is a Rangamati-based non-government organisation supporting the development of hill tracts people. See more photos here..

Rangamati is perhaps the most-travelled destination inside the Chittagong Hill Tracts—at least by Bengali tourists, that is. The region’s interest comes from its cultural diversity: the majority of its people are not Bengali. Instead you will find people from many different ethnic tribes. In Rangamati, the majority of people are Chakma, and are perhaps the most well off of the various ethnic groups.

The region also holds both a beautiful and a ghastly story that centers around the presence of Kaptai Lake. In the early 1960s, Kaptai Dam was built to generate power for Bangladesh’s growing electricity demands. During the construction, over 100,000 indigenous people were displaced, and many of them were never recompensated. While the lake itself is quite beautiful and peaceful, today it remains a bone of contention: the government began dealing with Bangladesh’s overpopulation problems by moving people on to indigenous lands and evicting the local people around the lake.

As a result the indigenous people began an insurgency that eventually culminated in kidnappings, ransoms and murders. In 1997, a peace accord was signed, but 10 years later many of its stipulations are yet to be fulfilled. Today it is a sticky issue for the Bangladeshi government that seems to have no resolution in sight. The balance between Bengali and indigenous people is delicate, surely becoming more and more unsettled as the days wear on.

In the following podcast we talk about what’s interesting for the tourists who visit the Hill Tracts and briefly discuss that naggling question of “Is the CHT safe?”

Volunteering in Bangladesh: A Slideshow Presentation by travel journalists Mikey Leung and Belinda Meggitt
7:30pm, November 8, 2007 – Travel Bug Bookstore, Vancouver
3065 West Broadway, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

***Latest: we now have over 30 registered attendees to the event.. if you’re interested in coming, please RSVP soon!

Photo by Belinda Meggitt. See more photos here.

What’s it like to volunteer in one of the world’s poorest, most densely populated countries? Not as difficult as one might like to imagine.

For Belinda Meggitt and Mikey Leung, the experience was inspiring, invigorating and life-changing. Bangladesh, a country better known for its devastating floods, intractable corruption and intense poverty, is in fact a beautiful and verdant nation rich with history and literature. For what they might lack in material possessions, Bengali people make up for with unforgettable and legendary hospitality.

On the evening of Thursday, Nov. 8, the travelling couple will present a set of their photographs from the country and talk about one of travel’s last frontiers—one that may soon be underwater because of climate change. They will also have photographs and designer handicrafts from the Desh for sale. Finally, Mikey and Belinda are also inviting members from the Greater Vancouver Bangladesh Cultural Association to attend.

All Travel Bug Bookstore slideshows and presentations are free of charge, but it is necessary to reserve seating. Please call (604)737-1122 for reservations, or send an email to info@NOSPAMtravelbugbooks.ca. (Please remove the “REMOVETHISFORSPAM” message!).

Mikey Leung and Belinda Meggitt are travel journalists based in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The couple originally travelled to Bangladesh as volunteers (Mikey for Voluntary Service Overseas; Belinda for the Australian Youth Ambassadors of Development). They are currently researching a new Bradt travel guide to the country.

Click on the thumbnail to see the event flyer: