Eyes On Bangladesh

My favorite part of the Eyes on Bangladesh exhibition was the first series by Munem Wasif, entitled “Belonging.” I thought this was interesting because the themes he mentions in his writeup along with the context Professor De gave are readily apparent in many aspects of the works displayed. Overall, the arrangement of the photos was different than the other series because rather than relying on a linear arrangement or one with some sort of progression or distinct uniformity, they were scattered in a chaos mimicking that shown in the pictures themselves, yet there was a definite center, where the photographs became more dense. I think this idea of chaos around a center is related to the theme of belonging. The type of belonging discussed in the writeup next to the series is community––many parts comprising a whole, each part not necessarily needing to be uniform to fit together.

The pictures themselves are interesting as well in that they play off of stark contrasts in light, which is accentuated by the greyscale color scheme. If you look at some of the examples below, you can see that each photograph uses light/dark contrast to accent some center. Wasif also uses lines to draw the eye to a center (like in the boat picture below.) Other than the content of the photos, this composition choice makes the them predominant through all aspects of the series.   All the pictures I took have a glare on them, but ignoring that, notice the central object in all of the images.