Overzicht deelnemende tentoonstellingen
Making Oneself
2015
Making Oneself
Samsul Alam Helal
Love Studio (2012-2015)
In an industrial area in Dhaka, Samsul Alam Helal runs a commercial photo studio known as the Love Studio. The studio provides elaborate, painted backdrops and props for locals, who mostly work in the surrounding factories, to visit and symbolically create their dream portrait for posterity, away from their actual social status and reality. A truck driver becomes an action hero, twins turn into Greek goddesses, and a boy who works for a roadside tea stall was unable to let go of a dummy of the artist Shahnaj, which he hugged and kissed in the previous photo session. For Helal and his sitters, Love Studio becomes the catalyst of everyday life, a breathing space from the harsh reality. At the same time, the studio manifests the transformation of the portrait tradition in Bangladesh over the course of history, as the sitters turn themselves from objects of colonial control into subjects of their own hopes and dreams.
Biografie
Samsul Alam Helal is een documentair fotograaf die woont en werkt in Dhaka (Bangladesh), en wiens interesses zich rond de sociale functie van het medium ontwikkelen. Hij studeerde af in fotografie aan het Pathshala South Asian Media Institute. Zijn werk werd in 2013 geselecteerd voor de Prix Mark Grosset en was finalist in het IPA Photo Essay 2013. De meest recente tentoonstellingen van zijn werk waren op het Singapore International Photography Festival en Eye On Bangladesh in New York (2014), de Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art in het Engelse Sunderland, het Chobi Mela International Photography Festival in Dhaka en het Festival of Promenades Photographiques 2013 in Frankrijk (2013). Zijn werk is gepubliceerd in nationale en internationale kranten en tijdschriften.