Art does not look away
Shahidul Alam is a Bangladeshi photographer, writer, and activist who has defined documentary photography in the Majority World — an expression he coined. A genocide survivor, he trained as a chemist at London University before choosing the camera as his instrument of justice. He founded Drik Picture Library and Pathshala, the South Asian Institute of Photography, nurturing generations of image-makers. Author of My Journey as a Witness — described by Life Magazine’s John Morris as “the most important book ever written by a photographer” — he was named one of Time Magazine’s Persons of the Year in 2018, the same year Sheikh Hasina’s government imprisoned him for 107 days for reporting on student protests. He is a National Geographic Explorer at Large Emeritus.
I am a genocide survivor and have lived through occupation. My passion for social justice may well have resulted from that early experience. I am also from a middle class Bangladeshi home and subject to the same middle class aspirations of respectability that such societies are subject to. As such my formal education led to me obtaining a PhD in Organic Chemistry from London University. But my engagement with the Socialist Workers Party in the UK during my student days, my participation in their protests and campaigns, and my observation of how they used photography as a tool for resistance, made me aware of the power of the medium and shaped my eventual choice of becoming a photo journalist. The first person ever to have done so in my extended family.
I have also been actively involved in bringing down a military dictator. Most recently, I have been engaged in the student led uprising that led to the fall of the fifteen year dictatorship of Sheikh Hasina, whose security forces had earlier abducted and tortured me, resulting in me spending 107 days in incarceration. The false allegation was eventually thrown out by the court under the interim government and after a seven year legal battle.
My need to become an artist was a direct result of having decided to take on the most powerful tool at my disposal. As a journalist, I would challenge the stereotypes and the disinformation that Western media so adeptly uses to malign the other. As an artist, I would disturb, disrupt and hopefully demolish the zones of comfort that those complicit in the abuse of the other hide behind. I would not merely inform them. I would shake them, haunt them in their dreams, seep under their skin and make it impossible for them to say “I don’t know, I didn’t know”. I would harness the power of art, and turn it into the sharpest weapon available. I would cut through the insulation that allows them to commit genocide. I would remind them constantly that they had long lost their moral compass. That their future generations, that their children’s children, would forever ask them how they could let it happen. How it was that such inhumanity occurred on their watch. That years from now, people would spit on their graves, because they allowed the mass slaughter of innocents to happen.
Years ago, I had produced a poster after the genocide of the Rohingyas in Myanmar that said “When Buddha Looked Away”. As Buddha looks away was what was being said at that time, because indeed Buddha had looked away. People were being killed, Buddhists were massacring ordinary people.
Today, the complicity of global leaders, the hypocrisy of Western media, the turning away of people in positions of power, who knew better and should have acted, reminds me that many others look away. Politicians who wax lyrical about freedom and democracy, media houses that espouse honesty, integrity and media ethics, billionaires who present themselves as philanthropists and people with corporate social responsibility, academics who swear by their belief in academic freedom. They are all culpable. They have all looked away. They have blood on their hands.
No thinking human being, no individual with a moral compass could look away. No person with a shred of humanity could look away. No person who considers himself or herself to be a thinking person could look away. At a time when words have lost their meaning, when ceasefire is a mockery, where humanitarian aid has become a license to kill, the only option left was to take action, in whatever way possible. If need be, to put our bodies on the line.
The flotilla taking aid to Gaza was a call to action. To go beyond the theatre of semantics, the jest of ‘ceasefire’, the inhumanity of forced starvation, and do what one could, in whatever way one could. We knew we would be intercepted, probably tortured, possibly killed. We also knew that by not going, we would forever have to live with the fact that we had failed to do all that we could.
I am reminded of the great artists before me. The prophets, Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, were performance artists in my opinion. Dying on the cross, while fatal, had immense theatrical power. Imagine that when all else had failed. One man clad in a loincloth, with thousands of other followers, gathered at the edge of the Indian ocean, and began to collect salt. And by that and other non-violent acts was able to bring the most powerful empire in the world to its knees.
Before I move to the flotilla, I must remind you of who the true heroes are. They are the Palestinians, particularly the Gazans who despite everything that has happened to them, continue to resist, continue to fight. Continue to show us what heroism means. If we could have done a fraction of what those people out there, the journalists, the medics, the mums, the dads, the brothers, the sisters are doing, it would be a different world today. The story is not about us, but about them.
The flotilla too was a performance. We knew we would not be let in. We knew the aid would not arrive. We know we would never set foot on Gaza. But by attempting to do so, by challenging the illegal siege, by our act of defiance, we would challenge a force that the most powerful leaders have been too scared to confront. Our act would break the myth of invincibility that ‘the most immoral army in the world’ would have us believe. We would prove they could be challenged, they would be challenged, they were challenged.
I represented 180 million Bangladeshis. I represented PACSOC, the organisation that tries to support artists working inside Palestine. I represented the Festival Academy. I represent you all. It was a way to show that our collective communities can together resist. That autocracy, militarisation, the criminal practices of our leaders, corporate takeover and donor hegemony will all be challenged. Come what may.
There are many things I could say about the flotilla experience. I will describe only one. We are in the middle of Negev desert in the high security Ktzi’ot Prison. We are unarmed, in cells. We have been on hunger strike, so we are also physically weak. But the solders are scared of us. They walk around in full combat gear with machine guns and riot shields. We can see the fear in their eyes. They don’t speak to us. No communication. We are isolated, kept in separate cells. There were seven of us in cell 12. We suddenly heard a song drifting through to the tune of Bella Ciao, probably from cell 7.
“We want toilets, working toilets
We want them now now now now now
We want toilets working toilets
We want working toilets now
Imagine this song echoing down the corridors of the high security prison. They are angry they shout and scream, but short of shooting all of us what can they do? They can’t stop this collective performative action? Cell 7 didn’t get their toilet fixed, but were able to be moved to a cell with a working toilet.
Art is power
We shall overcome
Palestine will be free
This text was Shahidul Alam’s keynote speech at the Global Artivism Convening in Salvador, Brazil from 3 to 5 November 2025.
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