Munem Wasif has honed his monochromatic way of visually interpreting the world
via LensCulture: https://www.lensculture.com/articles/munem-wasif-of-poetry-and-magic
Munem Wasif has honed his monochromatic way of visually interpreting the world. This juror for LensCulture’s Black and White Awards reveals the details that affect him most through the language of photography.
Rippling sea waves, dried river skeletons and endless fields. Water everywhere, but not a drop to drink. Each family needs about six pitchers of water a day, and they have to walk seven miles to get it. Ignoring knee-deep mud in rainy season, braving the biting cold of winter. In the seventeen sub-districts of southwestern Bangladesh, the normal flow of water has been ripped to shreds by the dagger of ‘Development’.
Munem Wasif’s deeply personal exhibit on Islam in Bangladesh took on added, urgent meaning a few days after it opened in Paris.
via Lens Blog: https://archive.nytimes.com/lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/11/25/islam-beyond-the-stereotypes/
When Munem Wasif was offered a gallery exhibit to coincide with Paris Photo earlier this month, he chose to show “In God We Trust,” his personal project on Islam in Bangladesh and his family’s relationship to it. Although he was uncertain how people would respond to the exhibit, he felt that after the Charlie Hebdo attacks in January in Paris that it was important to encourage people to think about Muslims in ways that did not play into stereotypes.
Wasif Munem was awarded a special prize by the Prix Pictet to document the struggles of people in Bangladesh who have lost practically all of their natural resources and ways of life as a result of short-sighted shrimp farming along the coastline
via LensCulture: https://www.lensculture.com/articles/munem-wasif-salt-water-tears
Munem Wasif has not gone to this blighted region to show us the abstractions of climate-change experts or the theories of macro-economists. Photography deals in the particular, and this project deals in the very particular. Wasif is himself Bangladeshi. Not for him the flak-jacket, the adrenaline rush, and five hours in the red zone. These are his people
Exclusive audio interviews with photographer Munem Wasif – lens culture photography weblog:
Prix Pictet winning photographer Munem Wasif talked with us about the ecological and personal disasters in Bangladesh caused by a vast influx of shrimp farming. He also provided some insight into his evolving philosophy as a concerned photographer.
