Munem Wasif’s image-based works explore the notion of trace in its various forms. His complex installations often mix photographs with moving images, archive documents or collected paraphernalia to reveal notions of impermanence and insecurity.
Bangladesh –
Through rediscovering his own culture, Munem Wasif aims to raise awareness around the world with compelling images of his Bangladeshi homeland. His photography is deployed as an elaborate tool for storytelling; the intention of his work being to get viewers to gain an understanding and appreciate the smaller unnoticed fragments of life in his part of the world.
Wasif deals with issues that are very important within the Bangladeshi community, taking the right tone to deliver very honest work that communicates what life is really like – a compassionate and emotional experience for anyone who views his photographs.In this in-depth interview with EMAHO, Wasif tells us how his grounded roots in Bangladesh have compelled him to become one of the most promising documentary Bangladeshi photographers around.
Tell us about your first discoveries in photography.
Well, that’s a big question… I was never good at academic studies so I was always interested in something else. At first, I wanted to be a pilot and then I wanted to be a cricketer, but that didn’t work out because as a kid they’re just dreams and my father wasn’t really happy that I was showing an interest in this sort of thing.
My uncle was a student of geography; for his academic trips he got to go to so many different places, so he bought a camera and started taking pictures. At that time he had some kind of interest in art so he was listening to all kinds of classical music etcetera. He came back home with all these negatives and photographs, which were all around his room. As a teenager I was always interested in what he was doing.
When I finished school he saw that I was interested in that kind of thing, so he introduced me to a photography school called Begart (Institute of Photography). He asked me if I wanted to start a short course for one month to see if I was really interested or not. I think that introduction was really crucial. The school was the first school of photography in Bangladesh; the founder is Manzoor Alam Beg. He passed away; his son is running it now. The interesting part is that this place was not like a school. It was like a studio. This man was from the 1960s. He had at least 500 LPs, different kinds of books; it was a very different kind of life from I had been exposed to. I was more interested to go there and just hang out with him and see different magazines and books, so that’s how it started. I finished the course and bought this Russian camera that didn’t have a meter, and was pretty difficult to get an exposure with. So I was going here and there, trying to take some interesting black and white photographs, but it was really difficult. At that time, I had already seen the work of Raghu Rai so I wanted to take photographs like him.
