In Conversation with Dhaka - Moiyen Zalal Chowdhury

An ongoing visual exploration of faces, encounters, labor, memory, and everyday life in Dhaka.

Series Description

Dhaka is often photographed through movement, congestion, architecture, and spectacle. Yet cities do not speak only through roads, skylines, or traffic. They also speak through faces, pauses, gestures, and brief encounters that emerge within everyday life.

In Conversation with Dhaka is an ongoing photographic exploration of the city through moments of encounter. Rather than attempting to document Dhaka as a fixed object, the series approaches the city as a living social world—fragmented, intimate, contradictory, and deeply human. The photographs seek to attend to ordinary lives that often remain unseen within dominant visual narratives of the city.

These images are not intended as definitive representations of Dhaka. They are fragments of conversations: moments where strangers, streets, labor, silence, memory, and movement briefly intersect. Through portraiture and everyday scenes, the series asks whether a city can be understood not only through what it looks like, but also through how it feels, listens, and returns our gaze.

Dhaka, here, is not simply a place. It is a participant in dialogue.

The Carrier

A photograph from the series: In Conversation with Dhaka

Taken in the heat and density of a Dhaka fish market, The Carrier follows an anonymous laborer moving through the city while carrying an oversized fish across bodies, traffic, and noise. What appears at first as an ordinary scene gradually transforms into a moment of visual tension, where labor, movement, and urban life intersect.

Part of the ongoing series In Conversation with Dhaka, the photograph explores the often unseen infrastructures of everyday life and the people who sustain the city through repetitive and largely invisible forms of work. By isolating a fleeting moment within the movement of the market, the image invites reflection on labor, anonymity, and the quiet symbolism hidden within ordinary urban experiences.

The photograph was selected as an Editors’ Pick and featured in the LensCulture Street Photography Awards 2026 Competition Gallery, recognizing its contribution to contemporary street photography and visual storytelling.

https://www.lensculture.com/competitions/street-photography-awards/editors-pick?photo=8235025

Photo © Sharat Chowdhury

A laborer carrying an oversized fish moves through the density of Dhaka’s market life. Selected as a LensCulture Street Photography Awards 2026 Editors’ Pick, The Carrier explores labor, movement, and the hidden symbolism of everyday urban life.

Fujifilm X100V Dhaka, Bangladesh 2026 Photo © Sharat Chowdhury

Mediated Witness

A photograph from the series: In Conversation with Dhaka

In the midst of the Ramisa protest, a small screen becomes the center of collective attention. Around it, bodies pause, faces gather, and fragments of information travel from hand to hand. News no longer arrives through a distant stage, loudspeaker, or official voice; it circulates through intimate acts of sharing and looking. The device in one hand becomes a temporary meeting point where individual uncertainty transforms into collective attention.

What unfolds within the frame is not simply a crowd observing a phone, but a moment of social reorganization. Different generations occupy the same space: children, youth, adults, and elders momentarily drawn into a shared orbit of curiosity and concern. A child rests in someone’s arms while others lean closer, listen, and watch. Everyday life and political urgency do not stand apart from one another; they coexist in the same street, within the same gestures and bodies.

The image speaks to the changing nature of public life in contemporary Bangladesh, where moments of protest and collective emotion are increasingly experienced through mediated encounters. Political events no longer unfold only through speeches, slogans, or physical assemblies. They also move through screens, messages, images, and shared acts of witnessing. The street becomes more than a site of movement or protest; it becomes a temporary public sphere where information, grief, anxiety, and hope are continuously negotiated.

This photograph is therefore not only about a protest. It is about the social life of attention itself—how people gather around uncertainty, how meaning circulates through ordinary encounters, and how even within moments of disruption, the city continues to create new forms of collective presence.

In the midst of the Ramisa protest, a small screen gathers strangers into a temporary public. News, uncertainty, and collective emotion move not only through streets, but through shared acts of looking.

Fujifilm X100V Dhaka, Bangladesh 2026 Photo © Sharat Chowdhury

Borrowed Wings

A photograph from the series: In Conversation with Dhaka

Cities often produce strange proximities. Dreams, labor, spectacle, waiting, and survival can occupy the same space while rarely touching one another. In this frame, a seated man rests beneath decorative wings designed for fantasy and consumption, while curved blades in the foreground and passing figures create a different world of labor and movement.

The wings suggest flight, aspiration, and possibility; yet they do not belong to him. They are borrowed symbols—commercial promises temporarily aligning with an ordinary body. Around him, steel, movement, and passing lives continue their own trajectories.

Within In Conversation with Dhaka, this photograph explores the uneven relationship between desire and everyday life in the city. Dhaka repeatedly stages moments where aspiration appears visible and close, while remaining distant at the same time.

Different lives occupy the same frame, but not always the same world.

Beneath borrowed wings, different worlds briefly occupy the same street without sharing the same moment. In Dhaka, dreams and everyday life often stand close together while remaining far apart.

Fujifilm X100V Dhaka, Bangladesh 2026 Photo © Sharat Chowdhury

Between Structures

A photograph from the series: In Conversation with Dhaka

Seen from beneath an elevated pedestrian crossing, a solitary figure moves across a geometric field of metal grids and empty sky. The human body appears suspended between structure and void—contained by lines, systems, and architecture larger than itself.

In Dhaka, movement is constant. People cross roads, bridges, and cities every day, often without pause or reflection. Yet beneath these ordinary acts lies another reality: lives moving through invisible frameworks of labor, routine, expectation, and urban design. The rigid structure dominates the frame while the individual briefly passes through it, suggesting the fragile place of human presence within the expanding machinery of the city.

Rather than documenting a destination, the image lingers on the act of passing itself.

Photo © Sharat Chowdhury

Beneath the city’s rigid structures, a solitary figure passes through a landscape of grids, steel, and empty space.
In Dhaka, movement never stops—yet people often remain small against the systems they inhabit.

Fujifilm X100V Dhaka, Bangladesh 2025 Photo © Sharat Chowdhury

Dhaka Looks Back

A photograph from the series: In Conversation with Dhaka

A brief exchange of eyes interrupts the speed of the city. In the midst of ordinary movement and passing lives, a stranger turns toward the camera and returns its gaze. The portrait transforms a passing encounter into a shared moment—where the city ceases to remain a distant landscape and instead becomes a face.

Within In Conversation with Dhaka, this image reflects the possibility that cities reveal themselves not only through buildings and streets, but through the people who quietly carry their histories, labor, and time within them.

Photo © Sharat Chowdhury

“A man looked directly at me near New Market. The encounter lasted less than a second. The photograph remained.”

Fujifilm X100V Dhaka, Bangladesh 2023 Photo © Sharat Chowdhury

Romance in Dhaka

A photograph from the series: In Conversation with Dhaka

Romance in Dhaka emerged as a quieter and more intimate thread within the broader project. Rather than focusing on conventional ideas of romance, it explored small and often overlooked moments of affection, proximity, companionship, longing, and emotional presence that continued to exist within the density and pressures of urban life. In a city frequently described through traffic, crisis, and struggle, these moments became another way of understanding Dhaka and the people who inhabited it.

I was also pleased to share a meaningful development within this visual journey. One of my photographs from this broader body of work was selected for display at the Urban October Photo Exhibition 2025 at BRAC University. The exhibition invited visual reflections on contemporary urban realities through themes including City in Crisis, Living on the Edge, and People at the Center.

Photo © Sharat Chowdhury

Part of Romance in Dhaka, this photograph explored how moments of companionship and emotional proximity continued to exist within the density and movement of urban life in Dhaka.

Fujifilm X100V Dhaka, Bangladesh 2025 Photo © Sharat Chowdhury

Under Passage

A photograph from the series: In Conversation with Dhaka

Beneath the weight of concrete and an approaching sky, a lone cyclist moves through the changing rhythms of Dhaka. Between structure and movement, the ordinary journey briefly becomes a quiet study of solitude and urban passage.

Photo © Sharat Chowdhury

Beneath the shadows of concrete and an approaching sky, a lone cyclist moved through the quiet rhythms of the city. Part of In Conversation with Dhaka, the image reflected solitude, movement, and the unnoticed poetry of everyday urban passage.

Fujifilm X100V Dhaka, Bangladesh 2025 Photo © Sharat Chowdhury

Waiting for Dragons

A photograph from the series: In Conversation with Dhaka

Seated inside a brightly colored dragon ride, a woman briefly occupied a space between imagination and everyday life. Part of In Conversation with Dhaka, the image reflected the unexpected coexistence of fantasy, labor, and ordinary human presence within the changing landscape of Dhaka.

Amid the colors of play and spectacle, a quiet expression transformed an ordinary moment into a reflection on dreams, waiting, and urban life.

Vanishing Point

A photograph from the series: In Conversation with Dhaka

This photograph explored Dhaka as a city of appearances and disappearances. The fog softened architecture and erased distance, turning everyday movement into something quieter, uncertain, and almost dreamlike.

Taken on a winter morning in Dhaka, this photograph explored the city at the threshold between presence and disappearance. Dense fog dissolved the edges of buildings, roads, and infrastructure, transforming familiar urban structures into uncertain forms. The elevated concrete line cut through the frame like a monument to movement and development, while tangled electrical wires stretched across the sky as another layer of the city’s invisible architecture.

Amid this landscape, human figures appeared small and temporary—motorcycles, bicycles, and pedestrians moved through a space where visibility was limited and destinations remained unseen. Rather than portraying Dhaka through its usual speed, congestion, and intensity, the image paused on a quieter condition of the city. The fog turned everyday movement into something almost suspended in time, where people seemed to emerge from and disappear back into the atmosphere itself.

As part of In Conversation with Dhaka, the photograph reflected on the city not only as a physical space but also as an emotional and sensory experience—where uncertainty, distance, memory, and movement briefly converged into a single moment.

In winter fog, Dhaka seemed to dissolve into light, concrete, and shadow. Beneath the elevated city, people moved through uncertainty as if emerging from and disappearing into memory.

Framed by Dhaka

A photograph from the series: In Conversation with Dhaka

Seen from within darkness, the city appears like a living stage beyond a carefully constructed frame. Human figures pause at the threshold between enclosure and openness, watching a dense landscape of concrete, memory, and endless expansion. In Dhaka, we often stand between distance and belonging—observing the city while simultaneously being shaped by it.

Between shadow and skyline, people gather at the edge of a city that never fully reveals itself.
Dhaka is not only a place we inhabit—it is also a place that watches us back.

Entangled Lives

A photograph from the series: In Conversation with Dhaka

Beneath a dense web of electric wires, Dhaka performs its nightly rhythm. Bodies move, lights compete, markets breathe, and countless individual journeys intersect beneath an improvised infrastructure that appears on the edge of collapse yet somehow continues to function. The city survives not through order, but through an endless negotiation between chaos and coexistence.

Above them hangs a knot of wires; below them unfolds a knot of lives.
Dhaka rarely untangles itself—it simply learns how to keep moving.