Shehab Uddin: From Below and In-Between, Photography as a Non-Extractive Practice

Shehab Uddin is a social documentarist, using photography as his chosen medium to reveal human nuances of the world. Often these layered parts of reality come from existential human conditions, deep poverty is one such example. Born in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in a family of nine brothers and sisters, his view comes “from bellow” and from “in-between”.

Emotiveness comes from the type of relations, the closer they are the more we care, he says. A central pursuit for social documentarists is the engagement with “reality” and “truth”. Shehab Uddin sees truth emerging in closeness and in intimacy, which he puts into the center of his documentary process. About he’s major work Chain of Poverty he says:

” Through collaborative storytelling I seek to not only give voice to the voiceless but also give voice back to these families and close the gap between ‘them’ and ‘us’. The aim is to recognize impoverished people as multidimensional and change the ways in which global audiences understand their lives and communities. I also seek to create an affective response in the audience through dialogue and presenting the visual story, breaking down the distance maintained by previous academic researchers, mainstream media and popular culture. In attempting to do so, intimate relationships have been formed and the compassion among us can never be broken.”

We are very interested in the process Uddin designs and in the wider aspects how his work relates to social documentary photography.

We learned that the “industrial awards/festivals complex” has rejected some of his works because he did not use a particular aesthetic trope. In that sense it is quite logical that Shehab Uddin is already for a while  not participating in the spectacle of value creation dictated by the profession of photography. Instead, he keeps quietly working. Among other things he has designed and created a ultra large format analog camera in collaboration with his friend Shaun Singleton, which serves as a deep counterpart to the synthetic, sterile and instant logic of today’s mainstream photography creating amazing photos through an intimate process.

Shehab Uddin: Portrait created using hand built ultra large format camera

 

Chain of Poverty: Born Into a Poor Family:  When we went to the Sunderbans together, Bellal Bhai said to me, “You know, a few weeks back, a tiger killed a person here, in the place where we are right now.” He has to go to the Sunderbans to fish and collect firewood day and night. He also risks being killed by Bengal tigers.

 

Chain of Poverty: This is the Life: “I’ve got pain in my right eye. I am scared that my other eye might get damaged because of this one. How can I work to earn to raise my family? I need surgery on my eye. He (Ali) has never asked me about the condition of my eye, never asked to get a loan for the surgery. He doesn’t have any feelings.” – Nurjahan Khala

 

Chain of Poverty: No Life on the Street: “There’s no life on the street,” says Jarina Khala. “We can pass the daytime, but it is really hard to pass the night… The suffering started from when I was born and I believe it will only finish when I die. This is the way it is living on the street.”

 

Outback Adolescent: Father Steven and Daughter Lizze: "Life is life... It's not what you got. It's what you live with and what you learn to enjoy in life," said Steven. "As long as you got your family with you are happy. So you want to be thankful, what we got... We are poor in money, but rich in love."

 

Shehab Uddin and Shaun Singleton with their ultra large format analogue camera

 

See more of Shehab Uddins work here:

http://shehabuddin.net/

https://www.instagram.com/shehabphoto/

Shehab Uddin is a Bangladeshi /Australian artist, educator, and photographer with over 30 years of international experience. He’s based in based in Meanjin/ Brisbane, Australia. His practice focuses on socio-political documentation, creating emotive, and immersive visual stories. His recent work explores history and memory through combining early photographic processes with cutting-edge technologies as storytelling tools. His work has been exhibited worldwide and has received numerous awards, including recognition from the Magnum Foundation, the Alexia Foundation, and the National Geographic (All Roads). His images have been widely published and collected internationally and are preserved in museums in Japan and Bangladesh.

Shehab earned his Doctor of Visual Arts degree from Griffith University and has taught across Australia and Asia.

 

Subscribe via Spotify, Apple Podcasts, iHeart, Audible, Podchaser, Listen Notes, nz.radio.net, or any other favorite podcast platform.

 

PODCAST CREDITS:

Hosted by: Oliver Vodeb/ Memefest​. 

Music: Thanks to Bait for their song Property Law. Two best friends meeting seasonally in bucolic surrounds to generate improvised music. Property Law recognises the Indigenous peoples of the world's relationship to land. As in, "we don't own the land. The land owns us." Each of us is only passing through. Empires, Epochs come & go, but the spirit of the land persists.