SHUMON AHMED, HOME LAND
Photographer Shumon Ahmed lives and works in Dhaka,
Bangladesh; a country plagued by extreme weather conditions
but equally resourced by fertile land. Since a boy, Ahmed has
watched his mother country become something all its own.
Despite the jarring climatic and agricultural fl uxes, aesthetics has
come to the fore, and the Bangladeshi contemporary art scene
refl ects a more positive potential for the county’s inherent cultural
and social structures; culminating in the inaugural Dhaka Art
Summit 2012 in April this year .
Deservedly Shumon Ahmed was invited to participate in
this fi rst series of summit exhibitions, and was like-wise invited
to exhibit for the 2010 Whitechapel Gallery, for Where Th ree
Dreams Cross, 150 years of photography from India, Pakistan
and Bangladesh, where, showing for the fi rst time in London,
Ahmed participated with a cornucopia of emerging and
established photographers from three closely inter-connected
countries. Photographers all of whom have used the camera to
defi ne and rewrite their own cultural histories, as an engaging
protest in Ahmed’s case, against the ignominy of a part of the
world branded by the west as a geographical catastrophe.
Well versed in his professional practice, Ahmed handles a
camera as an extension of himself. Conceiving of photo-works that are as challengingly absorbing as anything
from the photo-galleries anywhere in Europe,
and he is of a generation in Bangladesh that is
at the forefront of something quite radical, as
they actively seek international recognition for
their printed matter. Coming to photography
purely by chance, Ahmed was given a small
leather camera whilst still an inquisitive
teenager and rigorously began picturing
his city as if an alien citizen. Capturing and
then collating a swath of disposable images
of Dhaka’s dilapidated interiors spaces and
further its multitude of people industriously
manufacturing their lives for the city. Trigger
happy, Ahmed began pouring over the city
and sub-consciously built up a tool-box of
visual approaches to stealing from reality,
photographs of bleak misfortune as much as
positive hope. Going on to study photography
in Denmark and Bangladesh, Ahmed has a
balanced eye that is uniquely as European as
it is Asian.
