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Photographer advocates social change MADELENE RYAN

“THE public no longer trusts photography, but pictures have always been manipulated. We have just forgotten the majority of manipulation is not what is in the frame, but what is left out.”

So says internationally renowned photographer Dr Shahidul Alam, speak-ing at a special public discussion on the role of ‘the visual’ in communication for social change.

For more than 30 years, Dr Alam has used photography to advocate for social change.

Native to the slums of Bangladesh, Dr Alam was profoundly influenced by poverty and inequality, pursuing pho-tography to challenge oppression and imperialism.

Dr Alam is credited with helping Bangladesh have the highest number of documentary photographers in the world and has helped several Bangladeshi pho-tographers gain international acclaim by helping to ‘break the elitist culture of the arts’.

“I wanted to take art to the people,” Alam says.

“I invited some tradesmen friends of mine to an opening and they declined because they felt they were excluded by the arts community, thinking they didn’t have anything to wear or [know any-thing] about ‘culture’.”

“So I took my next exhibition out of the galleries and to the Bangladeshi peo-ple,” he says.

“By boat, on foot, we set up anywhere and everywhere...by really opening my work to the public, I hope I helped begin to remove some stigma about who the arts belong to.”

After obtaining a PhD in chemistry, Alam decided to turn photography from his hobby into his life’s work.

Alam established the award-winning Drik Picture Library, the Bangladesh Photographic Institute and is the direc-tor of Chobi Mela, a biennial interna-tional festival of photography.

Most recently he founded the Majority World, a photo agency dedicated to providing a platform for non-western photographers.

As a widely celebrated photographer, Alam has received numerous awards and praise, but claims his greatest achieve-ments are the people he has trained and the lives he has transformed.

“I’ve taken a photo of someone and had their family come to me after they died and asked for a copy, as it was the only photo ever taken of them,” he says.

“Our world of flesh and blood is not of words, but of images.”

Despite his many achievements, things have not always gone smoothly throughout Dr Alam’s career.

In June 2009, the Indian Border Security Force detained him while he was working on a project based on the river Brahmaputra.

He was released after an international campaign advocated his release, but is yet to speak publicly on the experience.

Dr Alam has ignored the

disparagement of authorities, continuing to photograph daily struggles against corrupt government and poverty with relative success.

The police sparked nationwide pro-tests in 2010 by closing down his ‘Crossfire’ exhibition in Dhaka moments before it opened.

The exhibition examined the alleged extrajudicial killings and torture car-ried by the Rapid Action Battalion in Bangladesh.

The police barricade around Drik Picture Library where the exhibition was held was removed after Dr Alam’s lawyers served legal notice on the government.

While Alam says he is no anarchist, controversy and challenges against cor-ruption regularly feature as his driving forces.

He says he understands why pho-tography is such an effective protest medium, trying to reach beyond intel-lectuals and politicians.

“The written word is undermining all other practices of communication, being the only defined, accepted form of lit-eracy,” Alam says.

“Academia is excluding areas where textual literacy is low. Writing is effec-tive in giving fact, but not good at giving emotions in a broad sense. It is impor-tant to remember in whose hands the

media is in.”Unlike many purist photographers,

Dr Alam thinks some of photography’s most powerful moments come from advertising.

“Photographs are used to massage the truth,” he says.

“The power of the image to short-circuit receptor resistance is what makes images both powerful and dangerous.”

Dr Alam visited Brisbane in August as part of a worldwide tour promoting the release of his book, My Journey as a Witness, the first of a series of 40 vol-umes to be published over the next 10 years documenting his work and travel experiences.

CELEBRATED: Dr Alam said “Our world of flesh and blood is not of words, but of images.” He has transformed lives through his photography.

TYNE HAMILTON

ABORIGINAL languages may cease to exist in the next 10-30 years if policy is not made to stop Australian becoming a ‘linguistic graveyard’, according to Aboriginal lawyer and Director of the Cape York Institute for Policy and Leadership Noel Pearson.

Mr Pearson told the 2011 Griffith Lecture that the Australian Human Rights Commission’s Social Justice report predicted that without inter-vention, Indigenous language knowl-edge would cease to exist.

Before colonisation there was 250 distinct Indigenous languages and 600 dialects, but most of these are no longer spoken.

“If Indigenous languages and cul-tures are not saved from complete extinction the well-being of our people will never be achieved,” Mr Pearson said.

“We’ve allowed the decline of Indigenous languages so precipitously in recent decades, in particular when we could have been doing very sub-stantial things to turn things around.

“Very good linguistic work has been done in the past but those efforts in my view on the part of universities have got to be reinvigorated,” he said.

Ghil’ad Zuckerman, Professor of Linguistics of Endangered Languages at Adelaide University, said 94 per cent of Indigenous languages were either dead or dying.

“If you look at the tendency today, out of 6000 languages worldwide we are losing too many languages.

“We might end up in 100 years with 600 languages; 90 percent will die,” Professor Zuckerman said.

“Out of the 250 languages 223 years ago (in Australia), only 15 are alive and kicking, in the sense that they are spoken by all age groups,” he said.

Mr Pearson said there was not a day that went by that he did not have some sense of real dread about the future of his people’s language, Guugu Yimidhirr.

“The heritage of our part of the world is in danger of disappearing

not only from the lives of people but also by being incompletely recorded, and we Aboriginal Australians don’t know how to stop it,” Mr Pearson said.

“We’ve probably only recorded less than 1 per cent of the original names (of places and landmarks) and when we think about those original names, they are hundreds of thousands of years old.

“They have been the names that have graced those places of the Australian landscape for millennium and yet we as a country have not stepped up to our responsibility to ensure they shall never pass from the memory of the nation,” he said.

Mr Pearson said there were many things that could and should be done.

Firstly, all Australians had to accept that it was not inevitable that we lose Indigenous Aboriginal heritage.

He said it was a crucial national responsibility that assistance and all efforts were put into motion enabling Indigenous communities to revive their dialects by distributing and sharing their languages with each other.

Action needed to save our endangered languages

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‘LINGUISTIC GRAVEYARD’: Noel Pearson spoke at The 2011 Griffith Lecture on preserving Indigenous heritage.

NEWS SOURCE

“If Indigenous languages and cultures are not saved from complete extinction the well-being of our people will never be achieved”NOEL PEARSON

www.thesource.griffith.edu.auSourceThe10