'Concealed': A Bangladesh Photographer’s Fight Against Loss of Female Identities

"The project started with only one audience in mind, me. I wanted to talk about my own experiences, my own feelings. But if you are honest with yourself, your journey will always touch other people, I always believed in that. And it has touched others in ways that I never imagined it would when I first started."

“Conceptual photography allows many different conversations to take place in one photograph. It can address issues in ways that photo journalism or documentary photography cannot. I have always been fascinated by being able to talk about a lot of things together in one photo story. Conceptual photography allows more space for different interpretations.”

“I was going through a depression. There was a time when I was not believing in my work and my worth the way I should have. But when you do good work, it will always stay with you. After that phase of depression, after that phase of not valuing myself the way I should have, I realized, I wanted this work to speak about myself. Speak about the experiences I have been through. In that way, it has made me believe in myself again.”

"The female curators have always been able to understand my work without me needing to explain it to them. Female curators, women working in the art world when they look at this body of work, they evaluate it as something they have experienced. They can relate to it. They can communicate with this photographic project. It talks to them."

“Men could also relate with this body of photographs, but they could not relate to the work as lived experience. They could relate to it, say, conceptually, but not as something that they have experienced like the way women did. The experience of being objectified of having no agency, the women could immediately identify with those aspects in my work, but very few men could do so.”

“We are doing really good work. It needs to be shown to the people. But there is not enough exposure of this kind of work in the mainstream media. I don’t think my work is at that level yet, but there are other photographers who are doing extremely important photography that are not being represented in the mainstream media. That’s a problem.”

“There should be more platforms to reach common people. Photographers who are doing important works, and getting international recognition, should try to reach (the) Bangladeshi audience by using different mediums, like publishing books, exhibiting their works more and organizing more events like Chobi Mela (an international photography event held annually in Dhaka).”