After a car ride back to Dhanmondi from old Dhaka, we started Friday at the Bengal Gallery with lightboxes to hang, labels to stick-up and Trent’s interview with the Daily Star journalist, Kavita Charanji (http://www.thedailystar.net/2006/11/12/d611121402128.htm). Kavita has a very thorough journalistic style, and followed Trent around the exhibition while he talked to her in-depth about the photographs and how they were made.
After labelling and tweaking the frames in the space (and fiddling with one lightbox that thought it was a disco strobe), Trent and I departed for the hotel for much-needed sleep and curry nourishment.
On the way though, we came across this scandalous headline in The Independent!
Ah, yet another demonstration of the tricks of photography.
The opening of Trent’s exhibition was a very ritzy affair with speeches by Dr Shahidul Alam, Trent Parke, Bengal Gallery Director Subir Choudhury, and Australian High Commissioner, Douglas Foskett. The High Commissioner and Trent were kind enough to hold this pose so that I could take the only decent photo I have shot on my entire trip to Dhaka. I think it is quite expressive and dynamic (not at all blurry or out of focus).
The show was a hit with the local audience and visiting photographers, and Trent gave an informal floortalk to the High Commissioner and his wife, and to all those within earshot.
It seems to be a great tradition in Bangladesh to break for tea and cake during such events, so after taking photographs of the crowd, I hung-out with Chulie de Silva (not “Julie” as I had first heard) and – revitalised by refreshment – we headed-off to the Goethe institute for the next series of talks.
Chulie works for the World Bank and has an amazing personal story of surviving the Boxing Day Tsunami. Her account of the disaster can be accessed via the World Bank website on www.worldbank.lk in their news and events section.
2 comments:
Demotix- The Citizen Wire
Dear Chobi,
You're site is fantastic. We hope you might see a cross over with what we're launching!
Demotix is a website for user-generated news, and a citizen ‘wire’ service. Think of it like Flickr or YouTube, but only for original photo/video news. You tell us what is going on, we tell the worldwide web and the world’s mainstream media. As of now, www.demotix.com is live.
Why are we doing it?
We believe citizen journalism – well-managed – can be a tremendous force in political participation, civil society, and freedom of speech around the world. And we believe the media needs rescuing.
• Only four US newspapers have foreign news desks (the NY Times, LA Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal), and there are only 141 US foreign correspondents currently working today (in print and broadcast media)
• In the UK, a 2006 study of the broadsheets showed that more than 50% of the news was directly attributable to press releases
• The world’s media (over 90%) relies on the wire services – the Associated Press and Reuters – for their news. But some 80 countries, or 40% of the world’s nations, have no bureau from either agency.
The news is shrinking daily. We hope Demotix can plug that gap, and more.
We hope to be giving a megaphone to the man and woman in the street with a story to tell. We hope to be able to change the news map – bringing real, raw, original information from countries and about issues the mainstream media haven’t touched in years.
Eventually we hope that Demotix will be THE place where anyone in the world can go, in safety, to upload news – major, minor, local, cultural, political, social... We already have agreements with the Daily Telegraph, Newsweek, La Repubblica, Prospect and others – and will now supply them with a daily wire and picture feed of 'citizen' news. We have also built partnerships with Amnesty, Reporters Sans Frontieres, Witness and many others.
But we need your help. We want to do in pictures/video what you do for text. If you think there is a cross-over and you like us, please write about us, link to us, spread the news. We're nothing without contributors, and your readers are exactly whom we want to be reaching out to. We can get their news out to the world, and in the process change what news is reported. And we'll charge the mainstream media for anything they use, splitting the fees 50:50 with our contributors.
Please be in touch! Are there other ways we might collaborate?
With all thanks
Turi
Turi Munthe
www.demotix.com
info@demotix.com
Nice blog.
See more at: Population of Bangladesh
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