Photo Feature

City in Frames

Sabhanaz Rashid Diya

"When you look at a city, it's like reading the hopes, aspirations and pride of everyone who built it.”
- Hugh Newell Jacobson

IMAGINE a room full of cities. Therein, you will find stooping buildings, suffocating traffic, wired horizons and lost souls. In juxtaposition, they scream out stories, they scream for attention.

Now imagine a room full of images. Images that portray a Google youth's vision of a growing metropolis. Images that go beyond the boundaries of their frames and provide a new found insight into a city dweller's life.

Indeed, a photograph speaks a thousand words.

IUBFPC (Independent University Bangladesh Film and Photography Club) recently hosted a photography exhibition amongst its students and members from 11 to 19 November 2009 at the School of Liberal Arts and Social Science (SLASS) campus gallery. The exhibition accommodated nearly 40 photographs from several budding IUB photographers. Themed around 'Urban Life', the images portrayed moving stories of the lifeless and life, of constructions and people, of blue skies and clogged roads. The diversity of the captures inspired visitors greatly as seen places were rediscovered and familiar faces reconstructed through the photographer's eye.

From over 90 submitted entries, the exhibited 40 were selected by the faculty at the Department of Media and Communication. Each photograph was a triumphant attempt at recreating our so-termed monotonous metropolitan lifestyle and showcased a variety towards the city that many have not experienced before.

The exhibition titled 'Urbanocular' was inaugurated by the Vice Chancellor of IUB, Prof. Bazlul M. Chowdhury in presence of faculty members, students, club participants and enthusiasts. IUBFPC is a body of student activities under the Department of Media and Communication with its patron, the Head of the Department, G. M. Shahidul Alam and its coordinator Jessica T. Suma, Junior lecturer, Department of Media and Communication. The exhibition was a successful event organized by the cooperation of club members and students from IUB.

(The writer is a student at the Department of Media and Communication at Independent University Bangladesh)