A long time ago Main Uddin, a young graduate during those days, used to travel in search of malnutrition –collecting data on its effects among children. He worked for a renowned non-government organization funded by one of the UN agencies. He revisited a few of the villages during a period of three months to find some of his ‘case studies’ dead and buried. According to Main that was the end of his career as a data collector. He did not want to be recorder of human agony if he could do nothing to change the situation. He did not want to be a lone gazer, but one who looks into things with a love that is generated by a will to do something positive. He chose to look through the lenses of a camera that for him till that day was just another hobby. He was determined to change this powerful tool into an object that brought lives together.

Main’s journey into the visual world around us is a political agenda – it is like that of a story-teller in search of elements that need to be bombarded with visual allusions from unseen domains so that reinterpretation of our visual experiences can be possible. In this particular age where a specific form of ‘sanity’ makes us blind to almost everything beyond our momentary existences huddled inside shredded nights and days, Main’s search begins with the ‘non-existences’ and the ‘non-specific’ – it makes a journey into the tormented terrains of the ‘abnormal’ and the ‘forgotten’ – areas that we have categorized as ‘dangerous’. It is not just a search, it is a process of reinstating beliefs using visual-motifs that associate with the abnormal, residing somewhere in the subconscious, that we erase from our lives. He shakes the foundation of our complacent existences and through his photography forces us to relate as active visual signifiers to a world we try to destroy from within ourselves.

I am A K M Shehab Uddin. Pakhal – the Bird Keeper – is my nickname and that's how I would like to be known. One major interest in my life is nature and wild-life, and birds just haven't stopped fascinating me after spending almost ten years with them. But birds were never the only project I would have liked to work. I have also worked as a photojournalist for a leading Bangladeshi newspaper. Documenting human life has always been a challenge for me that I willingly incorporated in my life. It is also something that I enjoy immensely. Besides that, I also work as a “fashion and advertising” photographer. My photographs have been published in different national and international magazines, books and newspapers. I have won both national and international awards. I work with Drik because this organization makes me confront the global issues and compels me to form a vision that would bring about changes in lives in this majority world. I believe that my visual imagination would one day be liberated with an active political participation of all the people of this world.