Shahidul Alam | The Majority World Looks Back

The Majority World Looks Back

by Shahidul Alam

It was a grand opening. The ‘Who’s Who’ of development in Britain was there,
championing the noble cause - the Millennium Development Goals, making poverty
history. The Bob Geldof circus could perhaps be pardoned. Geldof is neither a
development worker nor someone particularly knowledgeable about the subject. But for
the organizers of the ‘bash’ at the OXO Tower on London’s South Bank to produce such
a culturally insensitive event was revealing. Apart from parading a few young black
people from Africa, who extolled the virtues of ‘development’, there was little
contribution from the Majority World1. The key speakers, typically white western
development workers, spoke of the role that they were playing in saving the poor of the
global South. The token dark-skinned people, having played their part, were soon
forgotten. The centre-piece of this celebration was an exhibition entitled Eight Ways to
Change the World. All the photographs were taken by white western photographers. No-
one questioned the implication of such an exercise. When I confronted one of the
organizers he explained that the curator - a director of a western photographic agency -
had decided not to use Majority World photographers because they ‘didn’t have the eye’.
The sophisticated visual language possessed by the western audience was presumably
beyond the capacity of a photographer from the South to comprehend, let alone engage
with at a creative level.

This represents a shift from the position of 20 years ago when we started asking why
Majority World photographers were not being used by mainstream media and
development agencies. The answer then had been: ‘They don’t exist.’ Today our
existence is difficult to deny. The Internet, the fact that several majority world agencies
operate successfully, and that photographers belonging to such agencies regularly win
international awards, means we are no longer invisible. Now it’s a different set of rules.

1
A term introduced by the author, and being increasingly used, to replace the terms
‘developing world’ or ‘third world’ which most southern practitioners consider to be
derogatory.
We have to prove we have the eye. A similar statement about blacks, women, or minority
groups of any sort, would raise a storm. But when such prejudice is used against a group
of media professionals from the South, who happen to represent the majority of
humankind, no one appears to bat an eyelid. I have, of course, faced this situation before.
There was, for example, a fax from the National Geographic Society Television Division
asking if we could help them with the production of a film that would include the
Bangladeshi cyclone of 1991. They wanted specific help in locating ‘US, European or
UN people… who would lead us to a suitable Bangladeshi family’. The irony of making
such a request to a picture agency dedicated to promoting local voices had obviously
escaped them. We had gotten used to requests for iconic objects of poverty that
international NGOs insisted existed in abundance and had to be photographed - but
which locals neither knew nor had heard of.

Charities and development agencies need to raise money from the western public. The
best way to pull the heart strings - and thereby the purse strings - is to show those doleful
eyes that a few pennies could save. Perhaps photographers from the South cannot be
trusted to understand this. Perhaps they are so hardened to such images of daily suffering
that they are unable to appreciate the impact these sights might have on western
audiences - and the coffers of western aid agencies. But certain changes have been taking
place, forcing various adjustments. Media budgets have become tighter than they were.
Flying people to distant locations is expensive. Having western photographers ‘on the
ground’ can be dangerous in some cases - and costly in terms of insurance premiums.
Better to have locals in the firing line. So, slowly, local names have begun to creep in.
Certain rules still applied of course, such as the vast differentials in pay between local
and western photographers. Stories about Nike regularly make the headlines, but the
exploitative terms on which local photographers work rarely surface. The Bangla saying
‘kaker mangsho kak khai na’ (a crow doesn’t eat crow’s meat) seems to apply to
journalism: criticism of the media is taboo. Not only do the workers on the media
sweatshops have to work for peanuts, they need to know which stories to tell. None of
this journalistic independence rubbish: gimme stories that sell.

This, of course, affects Southern photographers. When they know certain stories sell, they
themselves begin to supply the ‘appropriate’ images. A man known to carry a toy gun in
the streets of Dhaka is repeatedly photographed at religious rallies, and despite common
knowledge that it is a fake gun, news agencies run the picture without explaining the
nature of the situation. Numerous wire photographers have been known to stage flood
pictures and in one famous instance, a child was shown to be swimming to safety in what
was known to be knee deep water. The photograph went on to win a major press award.
Money also affects publishers. Smaller budgets require careful shopping. The Corbis,
Getty and Reuters image supermarkets are rapidly squeezing out the ‘corner store’
suppliers and a small majority world picture library simply can’t compete.

But there are other factors in the equation. Development isn’t simply about money. What
about developing mutual respect; enabling equitable partnerships; providing enabling
environments for intellectual exchange? What about creating awareness of the underlying
causes for poverty? These are all integral parts of the development process. When all
things are added up, cheap images providing clichéd messages do more harm than good.
They do not address the crucial issue: poverty is almost always a product of exploitation,
at local, regional and international levels. If poverty is simply addressed in terms of what
people lack in monetary terms, then the more important issues of addressing exploitation
are sidelined.

However, the type of imagery required from the Majority World is broadening. This is
coming less from growing political sensibility and more from global economic shifts.
Negative imagery is seen as a deterrent to foreign investment in emerging markets. With
multinationals interested in cheap labour, and a wider consumer base, a different profile
is now required to stimulate investor confidence. So, along with the standard fare of flood
and famine, are stories of Indian and Chinese billionaires and how they have benefited
from capitalism.

Furthermore the new ‘inclusive’ media now take on more ethnic-minority journalists. But
when they come over to do their groundbreaking stories, it is the rookie on the streets of
Dhaka who provides the leads, conducts the research, translates, drives, fixes, and does
all that is necessary for the story to emerge. If things do go wrong - as when the British
TV Channel 4 attempted an ill-fated exposé in Bangladesh in late 2002 - the western
journalists are likely to be home for Christmas while the local fixers face torture in jail.

Lacking the advantages of our Western counterparts, image-makers in the South have had
to rely on ingenuity and making-do in order to move from being fixers, to authors in their
own right. We have had to be pioneers. With one filing cabinet, an XT computer without
a hard drive, and a converted toilet as a darkroom, we decided we would take on the
established rich-world photo agencies. On 4 September 1989 Drik Alokchitra Granthagar
was set up in Dhaka.

The Sanskrit word Drik means vision, inner vision, and philosophy of vision. That vision
of a more egalitarian world, where materially poor nations have a say in how they are
represented, remains our driving force. The European agencies I had encountered wanted
a minimum submission of 300 transparencies and told you not to ask for money for the
first three years. This constituted a massive investment for a Majority World
photographer, and virtually ruled out her entry into the market. We had a very different
approach. If a photographer had a single good image which we felt needed to be seen we
would take her on, try and sell the picture and pay her as soon as the money came in. It
allowed the photographer to buy more rolls of film and carry on working. The
photographers didn’t have printing and developing facilities so we set up a good quality
darkroom and trained people to make high quality prints. They had no lights so we set up
a studio.

The only gallery spaces available were owned by the State or foreign cultural missions,
none of which would show controversial work. So we built our own galleries. Few would
publish pictures well so we built our own pre-press unit and published postcards,
bookmarks and calendars which we sold door-to-door to pay for running costs.
Photography was largely male-dominated, so we organized workshops for women
photographers. There were no working-class people in the media, so we started training
poor children in photography. We couldn’t afford faxes or international phone calls, so
we set up Bangladesh’s first email service and lobbied for the introduction of full fledged
internet. Professor Yunus, the Nobel Prize winner, was our first user. We set up
electronic bulletin boards on issues important to us, such as child-rights and
environmental issues. We started putting together a database of photographers in the
South, and wrote off to as many organizations as we could, offering our services. No one
replied. Undeterred, we put together a portfolio of black-and-white prints, largely by
Bangladeshi photographers.

On a rare visit to Europe, I visited the office of the New Internationalist (NI) in Oxford.
Dexter Tiranti greeted me warmly. He had received our letter, but hadn’t given it too
much importance. An agency in Bangladesh seemed too far distant for the NI to work
with on a regular basis. Having seen the portfolio however, Dexter sat me down at his
desk and started ringing picture users across Europe. I remember feeling envious of this
ability to simply pick up a phone and call someone in another country, but was grateful
for the contacts. Dexter asked us to submit pictures for the NI Almanac. The next year we
got a letter from him that stated: ‘The photographs are beautiful and the reason we are
using only six is because we can’t really have too many from one country.’ Others Dexter
had phoned that day, and many others we have contacted since, have responded similarly,
and so picture sales slowly grew - but it was no easy ride.

Our problems weren’t simply ones of surviving on slender means and competing against
agencies based in London, Paris and New York. Our activism created problems on our
home soil too. We had, by then, set up our own website and had helped to establish the
first webzine and internet portal in the country. Our email network had been put to use
when Taslima Nasrin was being persecuted. The website became the seat of resistance
when pro-government thugs committed rape in a university campus. So the site, and later
the agency, came under attack. The day after our human rights portal
www.banglarights.net was launched all the telephone lines of the agency were
disconnected. It took us two-and-a-half years to get the lines back, but that never stopped
our internet service and we stayed connected. Later, Drik became the seat of resistance
when the Government used the military to round up opposition activists. I was attacked
on the street, during curfew and in a street protected by the military. I received eight knife
wounds. So we learnt to walk a fine line.

It wasn’t just the government that found us unpalatable. The US embassy felt it couldn’t
work with us because we opposed President Clinton’s visit to Bangladesh. The British
Council demanded we take down a show that talked about colonialism, and threatened
that future projects might be jeopardized when we openly opposed the invasion of Iraq.
Death threats, some real, some less serious and a whole range of sabotage attempts have
been part of the path we’ve travelled. Current strategies are more subtle. We know we
will never be given work by certain agencies and that visas for some of us will be more
difficult to get, but it is certainly not all negative. The main strength of Drik has been its
friends and their support. None of what we have achieved would have been possible
without the contribution of a large number of people, ranging from ordinary Bangladeshis
who have rallied when it mattered, to influential people thousands of miles away who
have provided moral and material support. Combining our compulsion to be socially
effective with the requirement to be financially independent has remained our biggest
challenge. It is a difficult balancing act.

Taking a principled position has other drawbacks. People work long hours for salaries
below the industry norm. There are few perks. But working at Drik is a special
experience; a great high. Not everyone can survive on these highs, of course, and job
satisfaction doesn’t help pay the bills, so we need to be competitive and ensure a level of
quality so that we can hold our own despite the political pressures. Eighteen years down
the road, we now have a workforce of around 60. Graduates from our school of
photography, Pathshala, hold senior positions in major publications. The working-class
children we’ve trained have gone on to win Emmys and other awards, and I believe
Majority World photographers feel they have a platform. The big agencies like Reuters
and Getty can provide images at a cost and a speed impossible for independent
practitioners to match, a very real consideration for picture editors under time pressure
and working to tight budgets. The fact that Corbis (owned by Microsoft) is buying up
picture archives like the Bettman is important for their preservation, but the images that
now exist 200 feet below the rolling hills of western Pennsylvania are no longer
accessible to the students, scholars and researchers. An important part of our visual
history is now in the control of one person - Bill Gates.

Father Paul Casperg, who has been working for many years with the tea plantation
workers in Kandy, has an interesting story to tell. Nearly 30 years ago, in his Masters
thesis at the London School of Economics, Father Casperg was able to show that an
increase of two pence (four US cents) in the price of a cup of tea being sold on the British
railways would, providing it went to the Kandy tea plantation workers, result in more
income than the total foreign aid received by the Sri Lankan Government. Father Casperg
rightly concluded that it was fair trade that Sri Lanka needed, not more aid. That is what
fair trade imagery organizations like majorityworld.com and kijijiVision are trying to do.
By invoking ethical standards in the trading of images, these organizations address not
only the distorted and disrespectful depiction of people of the global South, but also the
economic divide.

Organizations that call for Majority World governments to be more transparent and
accountable need to reflect upon their own ethical standards when it comes to depicting
and dealing with the South. Practices such as not allowing photographers to retain
copyright or film are justified by the ‘convenience’ of distributing images. Such
‘convenience clauses’ are rarely applied to western photographers, who know the law and
can exercise their rights.

We are resisting, though. The new portal, majorityworld.com, supported strongly by its
lobbying partner kijijiVision.org, has built on the extended groundwork done by Drik.
DrikNews.com, though still very young, threatens to give the wire agencies a run for their
money, and photographers in the South are pooling their resources, including developing
close partnerships with like-minded western organizations.

Recently, I was sitting with a small group of photographers, painters and filmmakers in a
corner of the top floor gallery of the Voluntary Artists Society of Thimpu. At the end of
the showing of a film on Chobi Mela IV - the festival of photography in Asia - projected
on a bed sheet pinned on the gallery wall, the conversation veered to pooling resources in
neighbouring countries. Sharing computers, scanners, and contacts, we talked of bus
routes to neighbouring countries, and finding public spaces for showing work. What we
needed was an on-line solution that would serve all Majority World photographers.

Having purchased expensive software produced in the West for selling pictures online,
we were further bled by consultancy fees we had to pay every time we needed to adapt it
to our situation. So, eventually, we developed our own software. It is an inexpensive but
highly efficient search engine that local newspaper archives can use. Developed using
largely open-source modules it is constantly updated using feedback from users from all
over the globe and it has worked well on low bandwidth. Groups in Bhutan, Peru,
Tanzania and Vietnam recognize that the wire services and the big agencies have a
different agenda. If it’s a guerilla war against the corporations that has to be fought, then
we need different tools. Light, flexible, inexpensive and potent ones. A revolution is
taking place. As new names creep into the byline, unfamiliar faces step up to the award
podium and fresh imagery - vibrant, questioning and revealing - makes it to mainstream
media, a whole new world is opening up. A majority world.

Shahidul Alam studied and taught chemistry in London University before taking up photography. He returned to his hometown Dhaka in 1984, where he photographed the democratic struggle to remove General Ershad. A former president of the Bangladesh Photographic Society, Alam set up the Drik Agency, the Bangladesh Photographic Institute and Pathshala, the South Asian Institute of Photography. He has been a recipient of the Mother Jones, Howard Chapnick and Andrea Frank awards. Alam is also a jury member in numerous international contests, including World Press Photo, which he has judged on three occasions. Alam is an Honorary Fellow of the Bangladesh Photographic Society and the Royal Photographic Society.

Bueno Kids: Hear From the Director

Growing up, my parents were well known among my circle of friends for always having a camera and taking pictures of my sisters and I. It didn’t matter how minor the occasion, everyone knew that my dad would be there with his video camera and my mom with her film camera. Read more

Blog Post: Heather Shaffer

Throughout the semester I’ve been lamenting over the idea of “photographic empowerment.” Does it actually exist? Does putting a camera in someone’s hands change who they are and how they view the world? All of these questions are subject to debate. For my photo project I have been documenting the surrounding area of USC. The USC campus is known for being in, well, not the best neighborhood. However, very few students tend to travel west of Vermont, north of Adams, east of Figueroa or south of Exposition. These streets create what I like to call the “USC bubble.” Therefore, I wanted to venture no more than a mile out of these streets to see what existed, to see what the culture was like around the area. Armed with my camera, I began my project. I call my project “Drive by Shooting” because I never left my car for any photo and had a friend drive me around as I documented the area. I was expecting to see a poverty stricken area, which to at some point I did, however, I was not expecting to see such a vibrant culture. Truly, I felt as if I had traveled to another country. There were women and men with carts filled with fruits or deserts or other home made goods. Most people were sitting on their porches conversing with one another. Some homes would have a single person sitting in the front alone just taking in the day. There were laundry lines everywhere with whites and colors hanging together coloring the air. Most homes had trash on their yard, or old cars and furniture. Everything was so different than where I am from. Manhattan Beach, while a nice town, is not a city in which you sit on your porch in the afternoon and mingle with the neighbors. Truly, I wish it was! I felt as if the outside area had such a strong sense of community. They weren’t simply neighbors, they were friends.
Simply driving around for a couple of hours truly changed by views on the area. Yes, it no doubt is not the best neighborhood, however, I truly believe we could learn something from the way everyone lives. In conclusion, I do believe there is such a thing as photographic empowerment. I think that this project opened my eyes and made me look deeper into the area. It makes me wonder what it would be like if an assignment like this was required of every student. Could it open more people’s eyes to different cultures and heighten their understanding of other people? I think its possible.

Blog Post: Emily Van Mourick

Corporate success may be the means to social
responsibility, not the sacrifice for.

One of the biggest struggles young people emerging
into the business world face is the difficulty of
finding a balance between maintaining financially
successful careers while keeping a socially
responsible lifestyle. Somehow in the last few
decades, students in business schools and in the MBA’s
that our nation’s CEO’s, they have been trained that
the object of their business is growth, as if that
were an end. It’s not an end; it’s a means. If we can
get the end back, the quality of life, then we have to
look at the contradictions, because the wrong kind of
growth reduces our quality of life.
Americans are wasting their time working and
spending. The average American goes shopping one way
or another five times a week. During the day we spend
most of our time working to make money so that we can
shop. There’s a growing weariness of having to hold up
the global economy, of having to sort of keep up with
the Jones’. While everything is getting bigger: our
houses, our vehicles, our waste-lines: we’re running
out of time. We have less of the things we care about.

People here are so insolated by our astonishing
concentration of wealth. Americans spend more money
maintaining our lawns than India collects in federal
tax revenue. Our defense budget, which is a trivial
percentage of GDP, is larger than the entire economy
of Australia. So obsessed by our own wealth, we forget
how the majority of the world lives and how the
majority of the world looks.
Too many entrepreneurs today believe that the choice
is between money and growth or social responsibility
and changing the world they live in. The fact is that
it doesn’t have to be an “either or” decision. True
success exists in realizing that the two are not
separate from each other, but rather, very dependant
upon on another. No true success can be accomplished
at the expense of sacrificing socially responsibility.
Acknowledging that the ability to create change
through the means available through corporate success
is what truly creates complete lifelong success, is
what separates those wandering and searching for a
higher calling from those who have empowered their
business success into a life filled with the purpose
of improving the quality of life for everyone.

Blog Post: Megan Baaske

I picked up the camera, looked around, and immediately wondered what to do. I had my assignment-create a project of 15 photographs. I had my topic-traffic in Los Angeles. But that’s where my certainty ended. I had no idea what to shoot.Before I took a class at USC on Visual Communication and Social Change, I was a complete novice at photography. I still am a beginner, to be sure, but the process has taught me a great deal about what happens when we photograph.

It all started one day as I was in the car, attempting to document the horrors of Los Angeles traffic. I snapped many pictures, trying to get a sense of what I could capture from my vehicle. Yet when I reviewed them, I saw ordinary sights and nothing remarkably profound. It turns out that, because we see traffic everyday, most pictures are sights we’ve seen a hundred times. Photographs of the mundane are not inherently interesting.

This project has been about growth. I have gone out to photograph countless times, in order to complete my photography project. Each time, it seems like I gain a greater number of usable photographs. In the process, I have gained a better understanding of how to take pictures, and what to expect when I click the camera. I have also learned about the process of photography.

As I began the project, I felt strangely out of place and embarrassed by my camera. Taking pictures of people would surely make them uncomfortable-how would they respond to me as I documented their daily commutes? To be honest, I was exceptionally self-conscious. I tried my best to take pictures surreptitiously, without anyone noticing what I was doing. (It wasn’t an easy task, especially when I tried to zoom in on people as they were sitting at stoplights).

Times passed, and I grew bolder. I realized that probably the worst thing that would happen if I got “caught” was some pretty weird looks. People might even been a little angry, but I was protected by a getaway car, so I needn’t worry. I think the turning point for me was when I was photographing last week. A couple of friends were in the car, pointing out interesting people for me to photograph. We spotted a woman eating in her car. I snapped a picture, but just as she moved the food away from her mouth. In my excitement, I shouted: “Eat again! Eat again!” What I didn’t realize was that I had my window rolled down (so the glass wouldn’t interfere with my pictures) and this woman also had her window rolled down. She turned and looked at me with a mixture of confusion, shock, and horror. We quickly drove away, but it was probably the highlight of the excursion. After that incident, I think I’ve conquered my fears of people noticing my efforts at photography.

So what’s my point? How does this apply to participant photography in general? Well, my classmates have shared similar stories of growing bolder with their cameras, and becoming less self-conscious. I am not alone in my experience. We have all gained self-confidence as photographers. I think this is directly applicable to programs that try to give traditionally marginalized groups a voice. Having a camera is an assertion of power. While a child, a student, or any participant might initially feel hesitant about that power, he or she will gain confidence. Photography is empowering; it enables us not just to document our voice, but to be in society and say, “Here I am, and I am not afraid to stand out.” That’s incredibly powerful for sections of society so often invisible to the so-called mainstream. It’s incredibly powerful for me as well. People like to blend in; drawing attention to yourself is hard. But it gives you a great feeling of agency to have a camera and not be afraid to use it, even if it means someone will look at you funny on the freeway.