I’m striving to understand the question of folk photography and international prize-winning photography. If we keep them side by side, what will we see? I’m raising this question to explore the further study of digital folk culture including digital folk photography and digital anthropology.

Through random Google searching, I found the names of international prize winners in photography from Bangladesh. I just took those images as an example of what we considered a prestigious language considering the subject and visual language. From this search, people can list a few common names, who recently won prizes.

In the list, we’ll find the names such as the Royal Horticulture Society (RHS) Photographic Competition, Paris’ Prix De La Photographie compétition, International Press Freedom Award, Discovery of the Year Award or Time and ASMP’s Global Portraiture Competition.

These competitions explore the success of the language and presentation of the photo crafts of Bangladeshi photographers, too. These photos stimulate and inspire to see the crisis in a particular manner. That success is constructed and measured by the West. Ironically, in the post-colonial era, anti-colonial or decolonization studies earn the apex attention in the area of epistemology in underdeveloped countries like Bangladesh. 

My concern is not to focus on those issues, of what photographers are capturing and what is gaining international sight. Already a small group of people, who capture, analyze, and promote photography as art, are concerned about those issues. That’s why I’m not bothering to share with readers that colonizers always choose the hut and slum as synonyms, what is documented as poverty and what later very much influenced the visual artist to create and express the local aesthetics. Still, artists like the broken houses, old cars, emaciated starving people, or hill people under the surveillance of the state, and at the same time aesthetically preached for tourism.