Monday 26 January 2015
6:30pm - 7:30pm
6th Floor Cafe SSH
Introduction
I suppose I first thought about starting this exhibition when I was still in Bangladesh. I had a feeling it wouldn't be something I could keep quiet about. Over the summer of 2014, I took part in International Citizen Service with Y Care International – a DfID scheme that partners up UK volunteers with charities on placements abroad. On my placement, I lived and worked in Bogra, a small town in northern Bangladesh, with the local YMCA and their development projects there for 10 ten weeks.
I won’t bore you with the hackneyed “it was a life changing experience for me”, because the aim of SNAPSHOTS is not to tell my story, but the story of the incredible people that I met and the extraordinary communities that I was fortunate enough to be a part of. Ten weeks might sound like a long time to volunteer abroad, yet I feel like I only scratched the surface of life in rural Bangladesh; however, I am so grateful for the opportunity to have gone to such a place to explore the realities, challenges and hope that living in a developing country holds.
The twelve photographs that comprise the exhibition are some of my favourites from the trip. I would by no means call myself a photographer or artist, but I feel that they capture some of the most intimate and thought provoking moments that deserve to be shared; often taken in candid moments and all through a trusty disposable camera. Alongside the images are entries from the diary that I kept whilst on placement, which serve as captions for the photographs. These may not be the most eloquent descriptions of events, as I had not anticipated them to be made public, but I think it’s appropriate for a personal interpretation to accompany portraits of these personal stories. From the teenage boy in a roadside barbershop with a faceful of foam to the friendly farmer amongst the field full of rice paddy, each image has its own story to tell.
Perhaps the main aim of SNAPSHOTS is to tell the story of these people through the immediacy of images, which I think can sometimes be much more powerful than words. If the experience of visiting this exhibition changes the perceptions of just one person regarding the negative stereotypes and generalisations of life and people living in the “Third World”, “underdeveloped countries” or the “have-nots”, then it will have gone some way to completing what I set out for it to do.