Title: Belonging

Photographer/s: Munem Wasif

Place of publication: Italy

Year of publication: 2013

Publisher: Editions Clémentine de la Feronnière

Language: English, French

Dimensions: 225 x 175 mm

Edition size: 250, First Edition

Binding, paper & printing details: Hard cover, case bound, black and white injket prints on coated paper

Number of pages: 169

Number of pictures: 69

Designer: Nelly Riedel

Editor: Bronwyn Mahoney

Printer: Grafiche Milani

ISBN: 3-932187-52-0

Retail price: 36,00 EUR

Where to buy; stores/ distributors/URLS: ‘Amazon’, ‘Photo-Eye Bookstore”, Personal website.

Link/s to existing book reviews: ‘L’Oeil de la Photographie – Dhaka: Munem Wasif Belonging’, ‘Asia Pacific Photobook Archive – An Interview with Munem Wasif’

Summary of project:

“Munem Wasif is a young photographer from Bangladesh. His book Belonging is about Old Dhaka, the historic part of the country’s capital, Bangladesh. Wasif lived for some time in this area and photographed the district’s daily life. His work allows us to see the city from a personal perspective rather than through the lens of the news photographer, whose focus is often limited to the latest devastating flood or earthquake.

Old Dhaka is a familiar place for Wasif  and this familiarity gives him insider’s access to the neighborhood. In turn, Wasif lets his viewers in on artful and intimate views of daily life: a restaurant chef preparing the day’s meals, a man getting a shave near the river, children playing, family and friends enjoying quiet time together, religious celebrations, a morning screening at an old cinema.

The sequencing of the various scenes creates, as Christian Caujolle writes at the end of the book, a ‘reinvention of a story that isn’t there but nonetheless has the freedom to exist’. In other words, it allows the viewer to wander the streets of Old Dhaka on his or her own terms, to imagine stories and narratives, and to daydream about what Old Dhaka might be like”.

—Marc Prüst