1. What made you shift and leave your high tech career of 24 years?
Art and literature have always been my passion. It is what lifts my mind to venture into the realm which is larger than life. It is my essence of being. While I was growing up, I had a strong sense of being independent, both financially and emotionally. Success, through formalized institutional education gave me that independence. I walked the path that many have done, took the steps toward socially expected success. One after the other, until I was at the doorway of the corporate world of hi-tech industries. The mid-nineties saw the onset of vast expansion of the technological world, and I embarked on that journey.
Art remained the passion of my soul but not the primary focus of my life.
At the beginning, the hi-tech industry felt enchanting — there was a feeling of so-called “creation” – the feeling of changing the world for the better. Our mind expands into learning and understanding and has the illusion of being vast and benevolent. It is intoxicating.
Soon, years rolled by that were accompanied by “success.” At the beginning it felt good, and purposeful. But slowly and surely the time came when I started seeing the invisible boundary of the world that I lived in; the system that I had been part of. I started understanding the interaction of society with the rest of humanity and started questioning the acceleration of technology and its impact on it. Surely, not all is bad — many humanitarian advancements have been possible because of technological development.
However, for me, it was time. I could feel in my core that this is not what I want to pursue for the rest of my life. I do not live in the illusion that I can change the world. But I needed to feed my soul; I needed to plunge into the world within me that I always felt to be the essence of my existence. And so, I did.
2. What made you choose photography as a medium to express yourself and books as a form to represent it?
We had a box of color transparency slides and an old Asahi Pentax film camera in our university quarter apartment in Dhaka. Growing up, these two items were my treasured possessions. I was intrigued with the slides and used to go through each of those over and over. It opened the past that I was not a part of — the life of my parents before I was born. The slides, even though catching mold, were drawing vibrant fairy tale photos of life for me. The camera was not functional as the shutter did not work and the thin layer behind the film cover was coming off. But it was enough to ignite a life-long dream in a little girl’s mind. My dad tried to get it fixed, but the shutter always stayed locked. Every now and then, I touched the black and silver body of this camera, thinking I will buy something like it when I grow up and I will take pictures. This is how it all started.
This fascination developed into a passion when I got my own camera after high school. I started with B&W photography and learned printmaking. Due to the course of life and norm of those days, I got into engineering. I continued with photography, using expired films which were available at a cheaper price. Eventually, I migrated to the U.S. to continue higher studies in engineering. My box of slides and the camera traveled with me. As any other immigrant having an American dream, I decided to settle in this country and started a job in the high-tech industry as I mentioned earlier.
I found myself getting nostalgic for Dhaka, searching for my soul and questioning myself. I had questions — Can I still connect myself to Bangladesh? How can I reveal that human landscape, before it completely fades? I had been visiting Bangladesh every year, trying to rediscover my carefree days and reclaiming the land and its people and continuing my exploration of collective memories. While working as an engineer, I never gave up photography; I in fact embraced it. My interest only grew stronger.
As my work became more digital, I felt the need for my images to tell stories that would transcend to a tactile form. There are photographic works that require more than one image to be displayed. I like to style and thematize the images like a diary, with less traditional grouping of images and with a more personal approach. I started to co-relate images that had been taken five to ten years back to the ones I did the previous month. These experiments and realizations seemed more fitting from the wall to the hand, from the public to the personal and were more intimate. The book format, with its sequential style, builds a visual narrative that unfolds page after page, with the images chained and connected, creating a unique visual and tactile experience. I loved the whole idea — the design, the tactility, the 3-dimensionality, and the intimacy of them. This is what drew me to the artist book format. During COVID, I took a few online classes on bookbinding with the Center of Book Arts in NYC. I also took a 10-day workshop with Void Impromptu (publisher based in Athens) exploring the concept of photobook making more rigorously. This opened a whole new world for me. The joy of creating a photo book all by my own hands was immense. Since then, I got hooked into the artist book format for my images. Over time, I took quite a few workshops with passionate professionals in the field such as Susan Kay Grant, Elizabeth Avedon, Melanie McWhorter, and Yumi Goto. I am privileged to have had them as my teachers.
The box of slides and the old black & white negatives with which I started photography are still here with me. I made two of my books – I Have Been Here Before and Will you come to Rome with me? – using the slide-images, old negatives, current collage images and other ephemeral material depicting memories and belongings that bridge the past and the present.
3. How important is it to make your books by hand as opposed to having them produced mechanically?
I enjoy making books by hand. From the concept to the full form, it may take two to four months to make the first copy of the book. From the photo selection to editing / sequencing to the design / layout and the back-and-forth between these steps; then to the print trials and experiments and then to the final book. As a book designer, I may attempt to incorporate many subtle elements to amplify my concept into the layout. It may go through three to five iterations of overall design, change, sequencing and subsequent mockups. I also sometimes introduce ephemera to the concept. In my book Will you come to Rome with me?, I wanted to add photos of my mother’s saree which I inherited. I wanted to make it feel like memories of hers weaved together like sarees that she used to drape in. I ended up printing one of the saree photos on Japanese paper as an end sheet. I love to have this kind of freedom and appreciate the liberation that stems from literally deconstructing my images and handmade prints to build a totally different art form — one that creates new meanings and new ways of seeing. I work feverishly before the final form of a book is born. Each subsequent edition takes less time after that.
This entire journey is very rewarding for me, something I may not get from mechanical or commercial productions. I have yet to approach any publisher. Even if I work with any publisher in future, I’d prefer to have close collaboration from the beginning through the entire process.
4. Within the book form, what informs your choices of design and layout for specific works?
For any book project, the images, the design and the layout relate to each other from the beginning. When I start thinking of a book project, my mind starts searching for the layout and design; it is an integral part. Without the right form, the book would be incomplete. I start looking forward to the type of folding, sewing and binding, color of thread, and the form. Would it be a sculptural art form to convey the concept or the regular book form? Every design element matters — the cover open flaps or gatefolds, full bleed, white borders around images, overlapping images, the texts, open or blank space for the reader to immerse into the thoughts and the choice of ephemera in the layout, if any? All this matters.
In my book Will you come to Rome with me?, I used Coptic binding with red thread and an open spine. My mentor Susan Kae Grant said, “The open spine feels vulnerable, like the memories of mother and daughter.” I would not have done this book without having an exposed spine or the saree-print end sheet. Similarly, the size of the book matters. This specific book would not be the same if I had planned to do it in large format instead of the smaller version it is today. Here, I have used old photographs from 70 years ago, which had been yellowed; instead of placing those in an all-white background, I color-picked a background of decaying paper of the older images. I may change the design or layout multiple times until it feels right for the subject; probing questions continue unraveling my inner thoughts and making me rethink how I want to do this. I start living in those times like the images from the project. I need to be totally immersed to give an immersive experience of the book as the reader journeys through it; the preceding page leaves a footprint in the eye and the sequential possibilities allows one to build a work with layers of information, and a visual support in dialogue.
Similarly, in the book Living With The Tides – The Sundarbans, the focus was to show the slowing of time in the Sundarbans and its mysteries. I showed its fragility through the structures of eight Leporello panels attached loosely and opening on either side, exploring the quietness of the mangrove ecosystem. I printed text on a layer of translucent vellum covering the image of the mangrove and boat prints on Japanese paper on background; depending on how the vellum is held, the text appears to go out of focus, as does the image depicting the peril faced by the Sundarbans today due to climate change and human interference.
For me, text or an accompanying essay is one of the most important elements when I’m making a book. All my photo books have substantial texts or quotes, be it poetic or mundane or philosophical. Incorporating texts is adding another crucial variable when it comes to design and layout. Tanveer, my friend works on the text or essays of my books throughout the process, making the readers’ journey complete.
5. In your process, when does your work take a specific form of the book? How do you balance the relationship between the contents of the book (the story) and the form of the book?
This is a continuation of design and layout choice which I already mentioned. It is all about the balance between form and content. For example, sometimes my subject is very personal and for such, I usually tend to keep the book form simple (non-sculptural). A lot of time is spent deciding how much is not too much, to avoid overloading pages with content. It would feel somewhat like a minimalist approach, where the intent is to allow the reader to become absorbed and connected with my emotions. The book becomes an attempt to make my experiences tangible with the use of content, sequence, ephemera, and lots of space. Finding that balance is the key. It encourages readers to engage with the content actively and make my personal story a universal one. This design choice effectively grounds the photographs, keeping them firmly rooted in the gravity of their context. Three of my books — I Have Been Here Before, Fading Away – Unbound and Free, and Will you come to Rome with me? fall into this category.
I also have few friends who go through my books diligently and give me unbiased feedback. The feedback received makes me rethink and allows me to improve the work in making it more balanced.
Another example is the volume In Stillness, where a set of three handmade artist books, The River, The Land, and The People are housed in a handmade slipcase. Initially I was doing the books in portrait format. While two of the books in the series worked well in portrait form, the first one – The River – was fitting much better as landscape when I made the prints. The quality of the print in panoramic landscape provided a more immersive experience of the moment of eternity and stillness. After multiple mockups, the set emerged in landscape format. For some subjects, I strive to explore the sculptural aspects of the medium by creating dynamic forms through the exploration of folding and binding, which happened with my Unfolding – Color of Life series. I talk about this in the next section.
All these elements are joined as a whole – a narrative with texts – where image sequencing is paired with that of the pages and the background color, that smoothly shifts to a different palette, to enhance, change, or simply question the process of embracing the journey through the book.
6. In your Unfolding series of books, how has the metaphorical unfolding influenced the physical unfolding of the book object, in terms of the specific folds of paper, final size of the book, as well as the edit and contiguity of the images contained within?
Making of the Unfolding series has been a joyous experience for me. The first in the series is the experiences from Old Delhi. It was exactly as Tanveer narrated in the book: “Not every experience appears in my mind as a book, some do and for some I become the part of that story that can only be narrated in a book. As I walked the old city of Delhi it was life at its infinite wondrous variation. Each nook and each corner are at its unique existence, yet no one would exist in its glorious beauty without the rest. A story of one linked to another and none losing its identity. It is a spectacle of color, fragrance, sound and above all the depth of life. Nothing is orchestrated, yet all are sung from the invisible notes of a great tune.”
For a few weeks I was wondering how I would express these vibrant waves of lives from Old Delhi or Dhaka — I wanted to give the reader the feeling of being in those places – surrounded by a kaleidoscope of life. I was combining multiple photos of varying size in each spread and trying to make the composite seamless as it transitions between images. It requires the viewer to use multiple senses as one journeys through the pages. The book tries to serve as a metaphor for exploring the tightly knit alleyways in Old Delhi or Dhaka or some town in Bangladesh through the unfolding of pages. It depicts a world of tranquility and harmony amid apparent chaos. It symbolizes the beating heart of beauty that is deeply ingrained in the depths of its earth soaked in rivers, monsoons, sun, and the love and heartaches of life. It is where one leaves their footprint to lay the path for another; not to mark their territory.
A visual and tactile exploration of composite images that unfolds the life of the place, and together it tries to form a visual and vibrant mood of life. This is where I wanted the structure to unify the content.
My mentor Susan Kay Grant noted it aptly: “The juxtaposition of the photos and colors brings a sense of vitality and captivates one to look and examine further. As a viewer you have given me entry into a whole world of people, places, and the many activities that make up life. The sculptural element is a powerful way to bring it all together, and when displayed reminds me of a community or village of houses. I also imagine the sounds I might hear if I were there.”
This book intends to offer a multi-layered reader engagement; it strives to be an exchange and a conversation, an ongoing form of giving and taking.
“This book thus symbolizes the unfolding, folding and linkage of life. A life that is vibrant without the pretense of ornamentation. It is a life of struggle, unadorned, and revealed; and it surrounds us, and it penetrates us. “
7. How important is it for you to include actual objects – whether photographs or botanical elements – as a part of the final book. Does this open it up for future edits and reinterpretations? Does that keep the book alive?
First, integrating an actual object in the book depends on the book that I am working on. It has to go with the flow of the book and also the feasibility of the object in question. Adding an appropriate element can make the narrative feel more alive. But again, what goes with one book, may not work well in another. For example, in my book on Spiti Valley (Fading Away – Unbound and Free), I was depicting our experience in the Himachal villages through images and philosophical essays. An unspoiled life for a thousand years, and now, the greed of capitalization has entered its veins. There was this evidence of popularity of social media and constructions of homestay everywhere in the valley. Our presence there with our modernity is the testimony of the inevitable forces of destruction. The transparency of the picturesque place is being rapidly decreased, and we felt it fading away. How could I incorporate this bleak transparency in the book? I reduced the saturation of all the images and added intermittent blank folds after the full bleed images of the mountain ranges. I wanted to convey silence. My heart, with all its desolation, wants to hang on to the purity of this land. I wanted to give the reader some hope. So, I added dried and pressed flowers that I collected from the Spiti River and put it on handmade paper used as the end sheet of the book. At the end, it would be the readers’ interpretations as to how they perceive the ephemeral. Would these open reinterpretations for future edits? Possibly. I was having only a handful of wild flowers collected from the valley; I may incorporate other elements for future edits. I was not planning to add any such elements for the other book In Stillness. The same goes for the tipped in pages and photos that I plan to make part of any book. So, yes it does feel like a book may have its own course of life.
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Photograph © Laila Nahar.
20 November
