Amader Kontho - Our Voices
SARPV
BANGLADESH

Our problems are made into photographs that detail our impairments only and hardly focus on the inaccessible environment and barriers we face, or speak about the discriminations we encounter. Our problems are seen as our personal ones, instead of being socially-created.

We challenge these social norms by focusing the camera on our surroundings. We want to talk about our problems through photographs. We had to learn photography in order to let our voices to be heard; our voices are never uncensored.

This exhibition displays photographs by fifteen youths with disabilities. Our disabilities range from total blindness to visual impairment, mental disability, learning difficulty, and physical disability. Whilst we individually face different challenges on a daily basis, we unite in a group in an effort to draw attention to the needs, views and wishes of people like us across Bangladesh. This exhibition is the first of its kind in Bangladesh.

We attended two photography training workshops in February and May 2004. We represent disability-focussed organisations namely ADD, CSID, FAVH-Dhaka, Prodipaloy-Chakaria/Cox’s Bazaar, CDA-Dinajpur, SPD Meherpur, and SRDD-Munshiganj.

SARPV-Bangladesh (www.sarpv.net) helped initiate the programme under the auspices of DFID-UK through Healthlink Worldwide-UK (www.healthlink.org.uk). Photographer Anna Blackman, from PhotoVoice (www.photovoice.org), a UK based photography-training organisation, facilitated the training-workshops along with two Bangladeshi youth photographers, namely Shefali Akter Shetu and Abul Kashem of the Out of Focus group (http://www.drik.net/focus/outoffocus.htm) who have been developing the photo-video unit at SARPV.