In Rasel Chowdhury’s new body of photographs, called ‘The Abundant Earth’, we find a voluminous web of images that are as much an illumination of an encounter between the photographer and a site of environmental exploitation as they are a view into his private meditations on the forms of photographic image that are routinely produced and widely consumed in Bangladesh today. While reaffirming his long-standing interest in the landscape image and of the representation of humanity’s encounter with the natural world, in the taking, choosing, and sequencing of the images here shown, Chowdhury deliberately introduces disruptions to that idiom. The photographs oscillate between the states of romantic landscape-image and of travel photograph, documentary image, tableau, even personal snapshot. Embracing the subjective possibilities of essay as form, Chowdhury wields repetition, juxtaposition, multiple vantages, and narrative indeterminacy to effect a discursive visual examination of a topical issue, of the act of representation, and also of the inevitability with which consumption — whether of photography, or of physical matter— forges reality.
