Shahidul Alam

Shahidul Alam

Biography

Shahidul Alam is a Bangladeshi photographer, writer, and educator whose career has bridged photojournalism, curatorial practice, and the building of institutions that have reshaped how the Global South tells its own stories. Originally trained as a scientist, with a PhD in Organic Chemistry (London University, 1983) and a BSc in Biochemistry and Genetics (Liverpool University, 1976), Alam turned to photography as a means of documenting and challenging injustice, and has spent the decades since building both a body of work and an infrastructure for photography across South Asia and the majority world.

In 1989 he founded Drik Picture Library, which he continues to lead as Managing Director, alongside a wider network of institutions he established to support photography, journalism, and media education: the Bangladesh Photographic Institute, Pathshala South Asian Media Institute (Founder Chair of the Pathshala Trust), the DrikNews photo agency, Banglarights (the Bangladesh human rights portal, taken down by Sheikh Hasina's regime), and Majority World, an agency for Global South photographers, which he chairs. In 2000 he founded Chobi Mela, the international festival of photography, now in its eleventh edition and among the longest-running photography festivals in Asia, and remains its Chief Adviser.

Alam's photographic and curatorial work has been exhibited at leading museums including The Museum of Modern Art in New York, Tate Modern, the Photographers' Gallery and the Royal Albert Hall in London, the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Arts, Le Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and the Museo Vivo del Muralismo in Mexico City. As a curator, his projects include “Water, the First Element” (2003, National Art Gallery Malaysia); “Where Three Dreams Cross” (Whitechapel Gallery, London, and Fotomuseum Winterthur); “Look at Me!” (Musée du Quai Branly, Paris); and “SPEAK” and “Justice in Focus” (United Nations Headquarters, Geneva). He has also served as Guest Curator for the Auckland Festival, New Zealand.

His own photographic series address subjects ranging from migrant labour, climate displacement, and natural disaster to state violence and enforced disappearance. “Crossfire,” his work on extrajudicial killings in Bangladesh, drew international acclaim and mobilised public protest; the government ordered the exhibition closed, but was forced to permit its reopening after Alam pursued the matter through the courts. His later project “Kalpana's Warriors,” part of the ongoing “No More” campaign, pioneered a method of laser-etching images onto straw, and has been shown at the Dali Festival in China and at galleries in London, Newcastle, Kolkata, Chicago, and Ahmedabad. His video work for UNESCO's Observatory of Killed Journalists was presented at the 2024 Global Commemoration of the International Day to End Impunity for Crimes Against Journalists in Addis Ababa.

Alam's advocacy for press freedom and human rights has come at direct personal cost. On 5 August 2018, he was arrested after giving an interview to Al Jazeera and posting on Facebook about the government's violent response to student protests over road safety, and was charged under Section 57 of Bangladesh's Information and Communication Technology Act, an offence that then carried a maximum sentence of fourteen years. He was held for 107 days, during which he alleged he was tortured, and five separate bail applications were rejected before his release in November 2018. The underlying law was repealed weeks into his detention, but the case against him continued for seven years until it was dismissed by the High Court in August 2025. His detention drew sustained international solidarity, and remains central to the recognition reflected in the Committee to Protect Journalists' International Press Freedom Award, which he received in 2020.

Alam's contribution to photography has been recognised with some of the field's most significant honours. He chaired the International Jury of World Press Photo in 2003, was the first Asian to receive the Mother Jones International Award for Documentary Photography, and the first Bangladeshi photographer commissioned to shoot a Time magazine cover. In 2009, the Nelson Mandela Foundation entrusted him with making what became Mandela's last official portrait. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society, was named a Time Person of the Year and the Lucie Foundation's Humanitarian of the Year in 2018, and later received the ICP Infinity Award (2019) and the CASE Humanitarian of the Year Award (2021). In Bangladesh, his honours include the Shilpakala Padak (2015) and Ekushey Padak (2025) — the country's highest civilian awards — a Bangla Academy Fellowship (2025), and the inaugural Michael Collins Path to Freedom Award (2024). He holds two honorary doctorates: from the University of Arts London (2022, returned in 2024 over the university's complicity in Israel's occupation of Palestine) and Ateneo de Manila University (2025, for his contribution to education).

Alam has also held teaching and advisory posts including Visiting Professor at Sunderland University, Regent Lecturer at UCLA, Adjunct Professor at RMIT Melbourne, and board member of Tufts University's Program for Narrative and Documentary Practice. He has lectured at Harvard, Stanford, Oxford, Cambridge, and Durham, and advised the National Geographic Society's All Roads Program and the Eugene Smith Foundation. In Bangladesh, he served multiple terms as President and General Secretary of the Bangladesh Photographic Society, and was founding Principal of the Bangladesh Photographic Institute (1987–1989).

Alam is the author and editor of numerous books, including “Satire and Ridicule” (2024), “Singed but not Burnt” (Emami Art, 2022), “The Tide Will Turn” (2020, a New York Times Critics' Pick), “My Journey as a Witness” (Skira/Bengal Foundation, 2011), and a multilingual edition of “Brahmaputra Diary” for Pratham Books, India, and has contributed to “The Routledge Companion to Photography, Representation and Social Justice” and “Blink: 100 Photographs,” which he curated for Phaidon. He is also a filmmaker, credits including “In Search of the Shade of the Banyan Tree” and “Goni”; current projects include “Listening to My Archives” (Steidl) and the film “Buriganga,” reviving the river at the heart of Dhaka.

Beyond photography, Alam introduced email to Bangladesh in 1993, helping initiate the country's digital transformation, and has worked in roughly eighty countries. He remains based in Dhaka, where he continues to lead Drik, Pathshala, and Chobi Mela.