To a foreigner from the so-called developed world, the country of Bangladesh brings to mind many things, most of which unfortunately are neither flattering nor positive. Words like flood, poverty and slums come to mind.

While it would be untrue to say that those things don’t exist in Bangladesh, one needs to remember that they are far from the only things that define either the country or the people of Bangladesh.

As a photographer, I am acutely aware of how my images can either reinforce existing stereotypes or go all out to challenge them. On each of my trips to Bangladesh, I made it a very deliberate and conscious effort to avoid photographing slums and beggars. After all, the world is in no dire need for me to add to the slew of images already available out there showing abject poverty and hardship in any developing nation. Slums and beggars are hardly unique to Bangladesh.

Instead, I wanted my images to surprise, to challenge outsiders’ existing preconceived notions of how Bangladesh “should look”, to plainly demonstrate through photography what the country and its people are also like.

Resistance exists in these portraits on two levels; they show a photographer’s resistance to existing stereotypes of how any photographic subject matter “should look” and a people’s resistance to the hand they have been dealt by fate.