Photography: Rural Bengal
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By Sahidul Haque
I started photography with an old Zeiss Super Ikonta in 1975, when I was just a student. I felt a growing urge to create ‘art’, to express myself and my vision of the surrounding world, artistically. Pictorial photography allured me. In the pursuit of beauty, I strolled every nook and corner of the neighborhood. But beauty eluded me. I made a frantic search for her day after day. I was overtaken by a frenzy to woo and seize her. For months, I could not rest. Gradually beauty began to emerge out of the ordinary objects I ignored.
I came to realize that beauty is everywhere but I had not the eye to see, recognize, and discover her. I felt the need to train my eye. I studied books and pictures carefully. Gradually, there was an awakening of visual sense, or, more precisely, photographic sense, within me. I began to look at objects differently, see and study them aesthetically. All on a sudden, ordinary objects before me cast off the dark film of familiarity and appeared, as it were, ‘Apparell’d in celestial light’. And I got myself involved all the more in creative photography.
Rural Bengal – land, life, people, and culture that I intimately know and love – is my forte. Still I am always haunted by beauty. My love’s labor is to capture the essence, the truth that lies underneath the external reality. I have dealt with common and simple subjects but transformed them into something artistic and uncommon. Much time and patience have I spent to observe and study them.
In the 80s, I started my photographic journey. Success came instantly. I received many prestigious national and international prizes, awarded by the State Governments of West Bengal and Tamil Nadu and the Govt of India; Second Prize in 7th UNESCO Photo Contest in Asia and the Pacific; Second Prize in Vienna Art Photo Competition; Gold Medal of the Pictorial Print Division of Photographic Society of America and many others. Besides, I held three Solo Exhibitions, two in Calcutta and one in New Delhi.
Then I went into hibernation for nearly two decades due to some crisis in my life. But the old creative spirit could not die down. It was reawakened and revived. And I restarted my photographic journey in 2009 with a digital camera.
You can find more of Prof. Sahidul Haque‘s work here. He can be reached at: haque.sahidul@gmail.com
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3 Responses to “Photography: Rural Bengal”
great !!
Well, he’s astounding as ever—his works, brooding and with the golden tinge of authenticity—you keep staring and staring at these photos…’the thinking imagery’—the picturesque, the tranquil, the calm, the sober, ‘the incredible’ rural lives of India: the heart and feel of rambling realism, ‘the ring of truth’. Proud to be a student. Best wishes.
Such a rich, spectacular kaleidoscope of images that has touched the core of my heart!! Thank you for sharing with us your artistic vision!!