|
| |
Shahidul Alam (BD)
Online Publisher, Media Activist and Photo-journalist
|
|
Shahidul Alam is a media activist and journalist from Bangladesh. He has led campaigns against the digital divide and the reconstruction of colonialism in the digital arena. Shahidul Alam also works as a photographer and is director of Drik, a photo agency based in Dhaka.
Shahidul Alam was born in 1955 in Dhaka. He studied and taught chemistry in London where he obtained a PhD from London University. In 1980 Shahidul Alam started photography while hitchhiking through the US and Canada and was nominated the best photographer of the year by the London Arts Council in 1983. He then, in 1984, began working as a commercial and advertising photographer in Dhaka and was elected the president of the Bangladesh Photographic Society in 1989. Shahidul Alam started documenting the popular resistance against autocratic president General Ershad from 1987 on and founded the Drik Picture Library in 1989, and the Bangladesh Photographic Institute in 1990. He set up DrikTap, and the first email network in Bangladesh in 1994. In 1997 he started the Drik Learn Initiative, a program that uses tree cultivation as a means of generating income to provide computer education in rural schools in Bangladesh. He also established Pathshala, the South Asian Institute of Photography in 1998, Meghbarta, Bangladesh’s first webzine in 1999, Chobi Mela, the first festival of photography in Asia in 2000 and the Bangladesh Human Rights Network in 2001. His work has been widely published and exhibited. He moreover was a jury member of numerous international photographic competitions including the World Press Photo where he has been a judge on three occasions.
Awards
Mother Jones Award (1992)
Andrea Frank Foundation Award (1998)
Howard Chapnick Award (1998)
Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society (2001)
Online
Drik
 http://www.drik.net
|
|
 |
|
|
