“People hug me in the street. They say: ‘You were so brave!’ I don’t think so.”

Shahidul Alam takes a sip of almond milk, his mellifluous voice resonating through the sunlit sitting room of a mutual friend. “The things I said are not earth-shattering. They are things we should all be saying. They seem remarkable because others are silent. We have a tradition of resistance in Bangladesh. For people not to speak is a problem.”

In August 2018, the photographer, artist, teacher and civil rights activist was arrested, imprisoned and tortured for 107 days by the Dhaka police after criticising his country’s Awami League government in an interview on Al Jazeera. So Alam knows why his compatriots remain silent.

Although Bangladesh is a democracy, its draconian restrictions on freedom of expression are regularly denounced by organisations such as PEN and Amnesty International. Yet Alam, though still on bail, refuses to play it safe. Since his release in November 2018, after a global campaign that included Arundhati Roy, Amal Clooney and Sharon Stone, his photographs, many focused on Bangladesh’s battle for civil rights, have travelled the world, including to the V&A in London and the Rubin Museum in New York.

Born in Dhaka in 1955, Alam went to the UK when he was 17, a year after his country won independence from Pakistan. In Britain, while studying to be a research chemist, he started taking pictures on the side. Always compelled to fight for social justice, he realised “the power of the medium” to “do things that words cannot do so effectively”.

Since then, Alam’s images have seared themselves on the collective retina of south Asia and beyond. Whereas Bangladesh is often viewed as the victim of poverty and natural disasters, Alam spotlights its resilience, courage and inventiveness. When reporting the devastating cyclone of 1988, for example, his shot of a woman cooking on the roof of her flooded hut encapsulated the nation’s refusal to surrender. In 2011, in his tribute to indigenous rights campaigner Kalpana Chakma, who was “disappeared” by the army in 1996, he lasered images of her fellow activists — Kalpana’s Warriors, as the sequence was known — on to straw sleeping mats, tugging his audience into the absent woman’s intimate world. Such intriguing, ambiguous images typify a vision that fuses the political acuity of reportage with the unpredictable flair of art.

His latest project, Singed But Not Burnt, a book published by Kolkata-based gallery Emami Art and accompanied by shows in India and Chicago, proves his political fire is undimmed. Its cover bears “Woman in Ballot Booth” (1991). Captioned “A woman avenges Noor Hossain’s death by casting a vote”, the black and white photograph of the figure marking her paper, head bowed, is Alam’s tribute to an activist murdered by police in 1987 during a protest.

The book’s final pages document “The Cry of the Imprisoned” (2020), an artists’ performance on the Dhaka streets protesting the latest law under which hundreds of writers, artists and journalists have been imprisoned.

Although these images testify to Bangladesh’s “tradition of resistance”, they also map a continuum of repression. Does Alam ever feel the struggle is hopeless? “No,” he replies firmly. “I can see changes in the offing. There is an awakened public in Bangladesh. The middle class was very, very protective of its comfort zone. But the BNP [Bangladesh Nationalist Party, chief opposition to the Awami League] are now standing in the streets and people are gathering around them. There are more and more dissenting voices.”

He pauses, a slight figure in his candy-pink panjabi, immaculately embroidered by his partner, the writer and human rights activist Rahnuma Ahmed. Given the menace, why continue to risk his freedom? “The fact that I’m out here, talking to you, is dependent on the fact that there was a global campaign for my release. Many others were ‘disappeared’ without [anyone] knowing about them.”

Alam’s project Crossfire (2010), present in Singed But Not Burnt, testifies to those cruel fates. These are oblique yet hackle-raising pictures — bullet holes in a muralled wall; a stained, crumpled gamcha (working man’s cloth) used as a blindfold before torture and death. Less oblique is the shot of a camera-wielding crowd — many of them Alam’s own students — photographing the police trying to close down Crossfire when Alam showed it at Drik, the exhibition space and picture library he founded in 1989.

As well as Drik, Alam founded the Pathshala South Asian Media Institute, the region’s renowned photography school; Majority World, a picture agency for photographers from Asia, Africa and Latin America, whose name illustrates Alam’s rejection of western condescension; and Chobi Mela, an international photography festival. In the book, a moving conversation between two of his former students, curator Tanzim Wahab and photographer Munem Wasif, both of whom now have international careers, testify to a teacher who held them “mesmerised”.

Alam’s empathy pulses through every shot in Singed But Not Burnt, from a barefoot ballerina-straight young woman striding across a desolate construction site with a basket of earth on her head, to human traffickers, languid of limb, sharp of eye, on a river boat. “I am not parachuting in to take pictures,” responds Alam when I ask how he evades objectification. “I am photographing our community. It’s my world too.”

His awareness that human choices underpin our economic system has fed his current project: a film about the deaths of migrant workers in the UAE. “Around 3,500 corpses return each year but the Bangladeshi government isn’t talking about it.” Alam’s film will include footage of the workers’ families as well as scenes in Qatar where, he observes, of the reported $220bn spent on staging the 2022 World Cup, “almost none went to the workers”.

“People like you and me — we deprive other people. Somehow we’ve decided the place of the subaltern is to stay where they are. If they’ve been born there, they die there.”

His work illuminates the nuanced reality of people who are so often invisible to those who benefit from them. It’s unlikely the film will make him any more popular with the Bangladesh authorities than the rest of his work. How long can he remain singed but not burnt? “Photographers have to be at the front line,” he replies calmly. “It’s about finding that space where you will feel the heat but stay alive. Martyrs do not make good reporters.”

At Wrightwood 659, Chicago, to July 15, wrightwood659.org, then at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Delhi, from July 17, knma.in

Think of 1990s fashion, and supermodels like Kate Moss, Naomi Campbell and Linda Evangelista immediately spring to mind.

The decade that popularized velvet suits, low-rise jeans and slip dresses is closely linked to the women who first donned them on runways and in racy ad campaigns (like Calvin Klein’s now-infamous billboard starring Moss and actor Mark Wahlberg), forever searing both the clothes and their wearers into our collective imagination.

During the ‘80s, the term “supermodel” became increasingly popular, with icons like Cindy Crawford and Iman breaking the industry’s boundaries in terms of stardom and earning capacity. In the 1990s, however, models became business and cultural powerhouses — not just within fashion circles but across media and the entertainment worlds, too.

Now, a new book celebrates their legacy and the era’s free-wheeling spirit.

Titled simply “90’s” the coffee table tome spotlights the work of French fashion photographer Thierry Le Gouès, who helped define the aesthetic of that period by shooting for magazines such as Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and Allure.

Featuring some 280 photos from his archive, the book combines intimate portraits with commercial work, and nude images with glossy, stylized editorials.

“It’s a love letter to that time — a collection of some of the pictures I am most fond of,” Le Gouès said in a phone interview from Paris, where he is based. “And there were still so many I didn’t end up including.”

A passion project

Le Gouès began reminiscing about the ‘90s during the height of the pandemic, starting with 50 images he retrieved from his private archives. “The moment I showed them to friends from the industry, they told me I should make a book,” he recalled, adding: “So, while Paris and the rest of the country was shut down, I threw myself into the project. It was a nice distraction during those months.”

Focusing on that specific era was a no-brainer for the creative, despite the fact he’d begun his career in the mid-‘80s. “There was such a specific sense of freedom in the ‘90s, especially in fashion, that no other period, before or after, has ever matched,” he said. “I wanted to highlight that.”

Most of the photos appeared in magazine spreads or fashion campaigns, which were Le Gouès’ main outlets at the time. Most of them are in black and white — a stylistic choice he described as “more cinematic.”

“I’ve never liked to shoot in color,” he said. “Black and white allows for greater mystery. It gives way to a rawness that a bright picture just doesn’t have.”

Indeed, Le Gouès’ images are strikingly dramatic. Most are charged with strong, sometimes edgy elements — a reflection of the tastes of the time, exemplified sartorially by designers like John Galliano, Azzedine Alaïa, and Alexander McQueen among others.

If the composite shots look straight out of a film noir — all darkness and light, femme fatale characters and sultry details — the portraits have a dream-like quality to them, as if offering viewers a secret glimpse of a different, almost unreal kind of beauty.

That goes for the nudes, too. In one, Carla Bruni’s body appears almost ethereal rather than made of flesh and blood. In another, Naomi Campbell is captured in a way that’s both stirring and sensual, without feeling overly sexy.

“The ‘90s was a decade of experimentation, and that’s what I did when it came to my photos,” Le Gouès said. “I’ve always liked to highlight the beauty of my subjects, with no distractions or elaborate sets.”

It helped that the photographer had established a deep trust with many of the models he worked with (Bruni, who has written the preface for “90’s,” describes the photographer’s perspective as “very special: imbued with delicacy and empathy”).

“There was a relationship of friendship and respect that I think is harder to find today, when everything is so much more fast-paced and we’re constantly fed new images,” he said.

Creating icons

Many of the book’s photographs feature faces that are still recognizable today, including Eva Herzigová, Elle Macpherson, Campbell and Tatjana Patitz — all names Le Gouès helped put on the map with his photos.

But the book also showcases a crop of lesser-known models, a number of whom are Black. This was a deliberate choice, according to Le Gouès, who worked extensively with women of African heritage and ethnicity in those years (in 1997, he published a book featuring exclusively Black fashion models, “Soul”). Including some of those same subjects in “90’s” felt important to present a more representative snapshot of the era.

While the industry still faces challenges when it comes to diversity, Le Gouès said he began seeing better representation take shape during the ‘90s.

“You had Naomi, of course, but also, for the first time, a whole cast of Black models to work with. Which I did,” he said.

Campbell was one of two contenders for the book’s cover. The other was Kate Moss, whose gold-painted portrait eventually ended up gracing the front of “90’s.” Le Gouès shot the image for British Esquire. “It was for a feature on Kate and how she turned everything she touched into gold,” he explained. “I thought it was a good representation of the decade — the golden age of fashion.”

Choosing between the two models proved difficult, the photographer added. “Kate is the ‘90s girl,” Le Gouès said. “No one was, or is, quite as emblematic.”

The British model appears repeatedly throughout the book. She’s on the second opening spread, and in the final pages of “90’s,” aged 17. A glance at Moss and her contemporaries is all it takes to be transported back in time. “They are icons,” Le Gouès said of the models. “I think these photos are proof of that. They are evocative but also timeless.”

“There was a certain romanticism to having to wait (months) for a magazine to come out to see your idols and these models on the page,” the photographer added, reflecting on his career in print media. “Traveling around the world for a shoot, building connections between us behind the camera and those in front of it. I think that’s what makes these images so special.”

“90’s,” published by powerHouse Books, is out now.

The Eretz Israel Museum Tel Aviv, in collaboration with Nature Photographers Association, opened an exhibition for Israeli nature and wildlife photography on June 21. 

The initiative is a biennial photography exhibition and competition founded about a decade ago by the museum. It features presentations by some of Israel’s top photographers who show their work to a professional and independent judging team who vote anonymously. 

This year, over 4,000 photographs taken by 410 photographers were submitted to the competition, of which 45 participants were selected. The photographs in the exhibition are divided into ten categories, which showcase the diversity of Israel’s nature.

A photo in Eretz Israel Museum’s 2023 nature photography competition (credit: Noam Kortler)

Who was this year’s photography winner? 

Dr. Tom Schlesinger, a researcher at Tel Aviv University’s School of Zoology and Interuniversity Institute for Marine Sciences in Eilat, was the 2023 winner. 

Other finalists include Noam Kortler and Asaf Amran. 

The exhibition is set to run through October 14.

Other exhibits at Eretz Israel Museum

In May, the Eretz Israel Museum opened the Black Life White Art exhibit, overseen by the museum’s chief photography curator Guy Raz. It displays the photography of Raed Bawayah, a Paris-based Palestinian photographer. In Hebrew, the exhibit’s name translates to Black Is Life, White Is Art.

Bawayah’s subjects range from members of the Romani community to Egyptian farmers, Austrian schoolchildren, youngsters in remote Russian villages, Taiwanese fishermen and Colombian ladies of the night. 

Another exhibit, called “Local Testimony and World Press Photo,” opened in January. It incorporates images captured by photojournalists in Israel and around the globe during the course of the 12 months prior to the exhibition. 

Barry Davis contributed to this report.