About sahidul
The valley veiled in soft morning mist to be awakened soon.
I started photography with an old Zeiss Super Ikonta in 1975 when I was just a student. I felt a growing urge to create ‘art’, express myself and my vision of the surrounding world artistically, so to speak. Pictorial photography allured me. In pursuit of beauty I strolled every nook and corner of the neighborhood. But beauty eluded me. I made frantic search for her day after day. I was overtaken by a frenzy to woo and seize her. For months I could not rest. Gradually beauty began to emerge out of objects I ignored.
I came to realize that beauty is everywhere but I had not the eye to see, recognize and discover her. I felt the need to train my eye. I studied books and pictures carefully. By and by, there is an awakening of visual sense, or more precisely photographic sense, within me. I began to look at objects differently, see and study them aesthetically. All on a sudden, ordinary objects before me cast off the dark film of familiarity and appeared, as it were, “Apparell’d in celestial light”. And I got myself involved all the more in creative photography.
Rural Bengal – land, life, people and culture that I intimately know and love, is my forte. Still I am always haunted by beauty. My love’s labour is to capture the essence, the truth that lies underneath the external reality. I have dealt with common and simple subjects but transformed them into something artistic and uncommon. Much time and patience have I spent to observe and study them. In the 80s I was engrossed in photography. Success came instantly. I received many prestigious national and international prizes awarded by the State Governments of West Bengal and Tamilnadu and Govt of India, 2nd Prize in 7th UNESCO Photo Contest in Asia and the Pacific, 2nd prize in Viena Art Photo Competition, Gold Medal of the Pictorial Print Division of Photographic Society of America and many others. Besides, three Solo Exhibitions, two in Calcutta and one in New Delhi, were held during this period. Then I went into hibernation for nearly two decades due to some crisis in my life. But the old creative spirit could not die down. It is reawakened and revived. And I restarted my photographic journey in 2009 with a digital camera.
- Sahidul Haque
