A photojournalist from Bangladesh, Shahidul Alam is known for his documentation of human rights abuses, war, migration, and political agitations, often focusing on individuals’ stories, and resilience over victimisation. He is the founder of Drik Picture Library, Pathshala South Asian Media Institute, and Chobi Mela, key institutions that support the photographic community of Bangladesh. 

Education and early career

Alam was born in Dhaka, East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) in 1955. He obtained a bachelor’s in biochemistry and genetics from the University of Liverpool, UK in 1976 — while also employed as a construction worker — and a PhD in organic chemistry at Bedford College, London in 1983. During his doctorate, Alam joined the Socialist Workers’ Party and participated in various political campaigns and protests.

Alam’s introduction to photography, in his university years, was accidental; having acquired a camera and accessories by chance, he took his first photographs while backpacking in the United States and Canada. His background in chemistry proved useful while developing prints in the darkroom, allowing him to repurpose expired film and experiment with alternatives to expensive chemicals; he began to offer darkroom services in Liverpool while educating himself in photography. His experimental techniques got his work noticed at photography competitions at local clubs; during this time he also worked as a studio photographer. After his return to Bangladesh in 1984, Alam took advertising jobs, but his primary interest was political photography. In the same year, he joined the Bangladesh Photographic Society, which often supplied photographs to various publications and clients. Alam was elected president of the Society in 1987, and added a darkroom and an offset printing studio to its facilities during his term.

Organisations founded

In 1989, Alam founded Drik Picture Library at his family home in Dhaka, towards creating a comprehensive photographic archive of Bangladesh’s history and supporting emerging photojournalists who faced difficulties breaking into the largely elite industry. The organisation went on to become the central node in the growing photojournalistic network, and among the first to disseminate information and images over email, in Bangladesh. In 1993, World Press Photo held its first award exhibition in Asia at the Drik gallery.

In 1998, Alam established the Pathshala Institute for education in photography — and later other forms of visual media — with a sensitivity to social and political issues. In 2000, he founded the biennial photography festival Chobi Mela — now Asia’s longest-running photography festival; and in 2004, the Majority World agency, a platform for non-Western photographers from the Global South — named after the term Alam coined for these parts of the world.

Political photography

In his first major project as a photojournalist, Alam covered the civil and political turmoil of the last three years of Hussain Muhammad Ershad’s military dictatorship (1983–1990), including strikes, protests and the government’s suspension of civil liberties; his photographs were published anonymously in foreign news outlets to protect him from punitive action under censorship laws. He also documented the celebrations when Ershad resigned in 1990, and Bangladesh’s first free election the following year — his photograph of a woman casting her vote at a makeshift voting booth became widely circulated as a symbol of a newly democratic nation. His images from these years were later gathered into a photo essay titled A Struggle for Democracy. 

Alam’s series Crossfire (2005–10) shows various locations where extrajudicial murders by the Bangladesh police were staged — photographs that were also notably presented as judicial evidence in cases to demonstrate inconsistencies in the official narratives of the killings. The project’s coverage in the Bangladeshi and foreign news media is believed to have led to a reduction of such killings in subsequent years. His series Kalpana’s Warriors (2016) is a series of portraits of Bangladeshi activists who have criticised the government for forced disappearances, particularly of the Chakma people; its title references Kalpana Chakma, the disappeared leader of a tribal self-determination movement. The portraits were exhibited at Drik, laser-printed on straw mats, which are commonly used in the tribes’ homes.

Crisis reportage

Following the 1991 cyclone in Bangladesh, Alam and other photographers associated with Drik were collectively able to convince the New York Times to carry their photographs of recovery and rebuilding efforts on the ground — significant at a time when Western media outlets tended to rely on local photographers from the Global South only for images of destruction and victimisation in the aftermath of disasters. In 2004, Alam travelled to Sri Lanka in the wake of the Indian Ocean tsunami to document informal relief efforts and assist with food distribution. The following year he covered the aftermath of the earthquake in Azad Kashmir and Balakot in Pakistan.

Social and environmental photography

In 1998, Alam documented the lives of communities living along the Jamuna (Brahmaputra) River in Bangladesh, including their cultural and commercial activities, and their displacement due to increasing erosion. His photographs and text were published as a book for children that traced the river’s history and route across countries, Brahmaputra Diary: A Journey to the Source of Asia’s Greatest River (2016). 

Alam interviewed Pakistani humanitarian Abdul Sattar Edhi in Karachi in 1995, and later documented the Edhi Foundation’s nationwide welfare work in a photo essay titled Humanitarian to a Nation: Abdul Sattar Edhi (2004). His photo essay Still She Smiles (2016) documents the work of Hajera Begum, a former sex worker and rape survivor who runs an orphanage in Dhaka. Alam has extensively documented the networks through which Bangladeshi workers have immigrated, with a particular focus on migration to Malaysia (The Best Years of My Life: Bangladeshi Migrants in Malaysia, 2016); as well as the arrival of Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh in 2017.

Censorship, convictions and attacks

Alam has endured various instances of censorship as well as targeted attacks for his work and political stances. In 1996, he was stabbed multiple times by a group in Dhaka, likely as retaliation for his public criticism of the general elections earlier that year. Alam’s first attempt to exhibit Crossfire at Drik in March 2010 was shut down by the police, a move that was condemned by activist groups, journalists, and human rights organisations. In 2015, Alam was charged with contempt of court for his support of David Bergman, a British journalist also convicted of contempt for disputing the Bangladesh government’s official estimate of the death toll in the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War.

In 2018, after being assaulted by a pro-government group while documenting student protests, he gave an interview in which he was highly critical of the incumbent Awami League government. Later that day, he was taken away by the police and detained at an unknown location without a warrant, ostensibly as part of a forced disappearance. When this location was discovered and made public, by fellow journalist Tasneem Khalil, Alam was officially arrested under Section 57 of the Information Communications Technology Act, which makes it illegal to criticise the international reputation of the Bangladeshi government on the internet. His associates and those protesting for his release were subject to government surveillance and intimidation.

Alam’s kidnapping and arrest were met with outrage and demonstrations from photojournalists and advocates for press freedom around the world, particularly organisations in Nepal, which Alam had helped set up. Cuban artist Tania Bruguera organised an exhibition of Alam’s Crossfire series at the Tate Modern in London; the New York–based art collective Illuminator projected ‘Free Shahidul’ on the walls of the city’s Grand Central Station. Alam was released on bail in late 2018. 

Alam’s vocal opposition to the genocide of Palestinian people by the state of Israel led to the cancellation of the 2024 edition of the Biennale fur aktuelle Fotografie (Biennale for Contemporary Photography) in Germany, which he was to co-curate with Tanzim Wahab and Munem Wasif, on the grounds of antisemitism on his part.

Publications and retrospectives

Alam’s autobiography My Journey as a Witness (2011) features photographs from both his career and his personal and family life. A year after he was released from prison Alam published The Tide Will Turn (2019), which presented essays and photographs on issues such as censorship, forced disappearances, state violence against Indigenous people, and the responsibility of photographers towards revolutionary movements. His body of work has been presented in two retrospectives: Shahidul Alam: Truth to Power (2019–20) at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York, and Singed But Not Burnt (2022) at Emami Art in Kolkata, India.

Awards and honours

In 1993, Alam was the first Asian photographer to receive the Mother Jones Award for documentary photography. He became an honorary fellow of the Royal Photographic Society in 2001. In 2015, Alam became the first non-White person to be appointed jury head for the World Press Photo contest. He was presented with the Shilpakala Padak — Bangladesh’s most prestigious award for art practitioners — in the same year. He received the Humanitarian Award ​​at the Lucie Awards in 2018, and the International Press Freedom Award from the Committee to Protect Journalists in 2020. Alam is also part of the advisory board of the National Geographic Society and the Eugene Smith Fund. 

At the time of writing, he serves on the faculty at Sunderland University and the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology.