GMB Akash is a Bangladeshi documentary photographer who has spent the past thirty years telling the stories of people living at the margins of society. Born in Dhaka in 1977, he began taking photographs in 1996. His work has appeared in National Geographic, TIME, Newsweek, The Guardian, The Economist, Vogue and Der Spiegel. He is represented by Panos Pictures and is the founder and managing director of the First Light Institute of Photography in Dhaka.
In 2002, he became the first Bangladeshi photographer selected for the World Press Photo Joop Swart Masterclass. A World Press Photo award followed in 2006 and, in 2007, he became the first photographer from Bangladesh to be included in PDN’s list of 30 emerging photographers. His books include First Light and Survivors, the result of a project he followed for ten years. Part of the proceeds from Survivors and its exhibitions went towards helping some of the people in the book establish small businesses.
What interested me most, though, came before the awards, the exhibitions and the international publications, when Akash was a student walking through the streets of Bangladesh with no film in his camera. He knew the camera was empty. He continued taking photographs anyway.
Film was expensive and he could not always afford another roll. He gave private lessons to younger students and spent what he earned on photographic materials, sometimes going without lunch to buy them. At that point, he had little idea where photography might lead him. He knew only that he wanted to keep doing it.
He had started with an old Yashica FX-3 belonging to his father, previously used mainly for family photographs. There was no photographer around to teach him, only an instruction manual written in English, which he could not understand well enough. Paying someone to translate it was too expensive, so he bought a second-hand dictionary from a roadside seller and worked through the manual alone.
“In that process, I was learning two things at the same time: English and photography,” he told me.
At night, after everyone had gone to bed, he turned the family bathroom into a darkroom and taught himself to develop black-and-white photographs. He was studying business administration, but he described the need to photograph as something physical, felt in his chest and his fingertips.
“Photography was my breath.”
From the beginning, his attention went towards people: their faces, their emotions and the lives they led. He had grown up close to one of Bangladesh’s largest red-light districts. He remembers hearing women shouting and crying, seeing fights and wondering why they were treated with such violence. His parents told him to avoid the area, but he wanted to understand what was happening there.
He also remembers a transgender woman who worked in an uncle’s home and was regularly mocked and humiliated. He was young and could not understand why she was treated differently from anyone else.Years later, he began photographing sex workers, transgender people and members of Bangladesh’s gay community.
Access was difficult, and understandably so. Many of the people he wanted to photograph had little reason to trust someone arriving from outside with a camera. Akash did not begin by taking pictures. He returned repeatedly, talking to people, watching television and films with them, sometimes going swimming with them. Three months might pass before he took out his camera. Sometimes six.
“I first try to understand their lives, explain who I am, why I am there and what I want to do,” he said.
Only after people knew him, and had seen that he would keep returning, did they allow him into the more private parts of their lives. He still rarely raises his camera on the street without first acknowledging the person in front of him.
“People read your energy even before you speak. They can see how you look, how you smile, how you walk with your camera.”
For Akash, permission is not contained entirely in a verbal yes or no. It begins earlier, in the way a photographer arrives, the amount of time they are prepared to give and what the person being photographed understands about their intentions.
Many of the people in his photographs have remained in his life long after a project or assignment ended. That closeness has shaped the work, but it has also made it more difficult for him to separate the act of photographing someone from what happens afterwards. Once a person has allowed you into their life, when does your responsibility towards them end?
Much of his work deals with poverty, child labour, exploitation and profound social inequality. He knows how quickly a photograph can reduce a life to its most difficult circumstances.
“I never want to show people only as victims,” he told me. “Behind every difficult situation, there is a human being with courage, dreams, strength and hope.”
He does not soften the conditions in which people are living, nor does he want hardship to become the only thing visible. Poverty may determine where someone lives, whether a child attends school or how a family survives, but it cannot explain the entirety of a person.
Working closely with families struggling to meet their basic needs, or with children who work instead of going to school, has often left him angry, sad and powerless. A photographer can finish an assignment, return home and begin editing. The life inside the frame continues.
For many years, Akash believed that making these stories visible could help change them. His photographs were published, exhibited and awarded, reaching audiences far beyond Bangladesh. Yet when he returned to some of the communities he had photographed, he found that very little had changed for the people living there.
“A powerful photograph can change people’s perspectives. It can make people kinder and bring more empathy.”
He continues to believe in that possibility. A photograph may stop someone in front of a life they would otherwise never encounter. It may disturb an assumption or alter how a person sees. But a photograph cannot, by itself, give a family a stable income or allow a child to leave work and return to school.
Meanwhile, Akash’s own career was advancing.
“Because of these people, I am here today. You are talking to me because of them. People know me because of them.”
Around fifteen years ago, he began using his earnings, along with proceeds from books, exhibitions and workshops, to help some of the people he had photographed. He has provided families with cows, auto rickshaws, grocery shops and sewing machines, giving them a source of income they could continue to rely on. He has paid for children to attend school, sometimes compensating their families for the wages lost when the child stopped working.
There is no NGO or foundation behind this. Akash organises the support himself..
“I don’t do it for photography,” he told me. “I do it for myself, because being able to do something for these people gives me happiness.”
The distinction matters to him. He does not present this assistance as evidence of what documentary photography can achieve, or as a model that resolves the imbalance between photographer and subject. It is something he feels compelled to do because the people in the photographs are no longer strangers to him, and because his success cannot be separated from the access they gave him.
Not everyone in Bangladesh sees his work in the same way. Some have accused him of concentrating too heavily on poverty and presenting a negative image of the country. He understands why people might prefer photographs of landscapes, prosperous cities or a more reassuring version of Bangladesh. That is not where his attention goes.
“My intention is not to create a negative image of Bangladesh. The people I photograph are not a weakness of my country. They are an important part of its story.”
Photographing child labour or exploitation also means looking at the conditions that allow them to continue: poverty, low wages and the lack of other possibilities. Refusing to photograph those realities would not remove them.
Our conversation eventually turned to who is given the opportunity to tell such stories in the first place, particularly when the photographer comes from outside Europe or North America.
Akash spoke about visas, travel costs and the difficulty of meeting editors in person. Photographers from Bangladesh cannot always travel quickly when a story is developing abroad. Even when something is happening within Bangladesh, an international publication may send a visiting photographer rather than commission someone who already knows the language, history and culture.
He has also become skeptical about the influence of professional networks. In his experience, good work does not automatically lead to visibility. Personal connections carry considerable weight, although the industry is not always willing to acknowledge how much.
After years of submitting his photographs to competitions, he stopped. Awards had once seemed important to him, particularly as a young Bangladeshi photographer trying to establish himself internationally. Over time, the people in the photographs, and what happened to them after the images were published, began to matter more than the recognition the work received.
“Photography and helping people come from the same place: empathy,” he told me. “The camera allowed me to understand their lives, and that understanding encouraged me to take action.”
Perhaps this is the tension that remains at the centre of his work. Photography has brought Akash closer to lives he wanted to understand, and it has carried those lives into magazines, galleries and conversations around the world. It has also brought him opportunities that did not necessarily reach the people in front of his camera.
He cannot undo that imbalance, and helping a family open a grocery shop or sending a child back to school cannot resolve the larger questions surrounding documentary photography. But he has refused to treat the publication of an image as the end of the relationship.
The student who once walked through Dhaka taking photographs with an empty camera now has international recognition, books, exhibitions and three decades of work behind him. Yet when he talks about photography, he returns not to the pictures he has taken, but to the people who allowed him to take them.
Silvia Donà