Chasing after climate change: A photojournalist’s stunning journey into a crisis

Far from the madding crowd, in the quiet villages of Bagerhat, Satkhira and Khulna, a silent enemy is constantly at the door, often breaching boundaries in covert and overt ways.

Be it in the form of raging cyclones, salt water intrusion or river bank erosion, the enemy is here to stay. The coastal regions of Bangladesh, especially in the Sundarbans in Khulna, is where climate change can be seen in its full, terrifying form.

Many families have already moved from the villages there, making way to safer grounds in cities. Many have been forced to change professions. Many others have contracted diseases unknown to them. Meanwhile, the largest mangrove forest in the world is taking a battering by putting its fragile ecosystem at risk.

All of these people appear in Mohammad Rakibul Hasan's The Blue Fig, a stunning visual research on the climate crisis in the coastal belt of the Sundarbans in Bangladesh which leaves viewers pondering the realities of a land not so distant.

Hasan started photographing people's lives near the Sundarbans in 2009. In 2007, cyclones Sidr and Aila had upended the lives of the coastal people and Hasan was there to capture the fallout in full detail.

"As photojournalists, we have a responsibility. If people aren't aware of what's happening to people, then who will be? City dwellers can't even imagine the vast emptiness and the howling of the wind for mile after mile. Lives are being looted. Salt intrusion is disrupting women's reproductive health. Adolescents' menstruation cycles are being delayed or becoming irregular," Hasan said in conversation with The Business Standard.

For Hasan's The Blue Fig, with all signs of it becoming a seminal piece, the artist has opted to blend visual story-telling with text and documentation.   

Eschewing traditional approaches, Hasan creates a hybrid of sorts, rich in information, visually appealing and something that invites the audience to take part.

"The aim is to find new strategies for telling a photo story by combining conceptual, contextual, and reproducing historical paintings into the photographs, adding archival photos of traditional photographic production and style, and appropriating found images," he said.

Highlighting how most photo stories go in linear and chronological ways, he says "The Blue Fig" uses a non-linear photo narrative with some subplots.

"Telling stories through photographs is more challenging than making a dynamic feature film. The photo is static and, by default, mute; it is more interpretative. When sequential images create a series or a narrative, it shows incoherently many things. Making bridges among the photos in a narrative is a forced adaptation of telling stories. Text can fill the gaps sometimes. However, the practice-led production of a photo story for "The Blue Fig" is experimental, experiential, and ambitious," he said.

He hopes The Blue Fig series can bring more attention to the crucial climate crisis plaguing the Sundarbans.

"People have to walk for one or two hours for some fresh water there. This work is mostly done by children. So after class 2 not many people get time to go to school," he said, emphasising the extent of the problem in the Sundarbans.

The visual journey he offers leaves many struck with a horrible awe.

The Last Supper

One of the most spectacular photos in the series is titled "The Last Supper", which is a reimagination of Leonardo da Vinci's Milan fresco.

In Hasan's work, the prophet and disciples are replaced by families in Praptapnagar village in Assasuni in Satkhira, right on the edge of the Sundarbans. They all sit at the table, which has a spread of their last items of food. The table is the middle of the salt water, which has been consuming lands at a rapid rate.

Their last meal consisted of pumpkins, radishes, and other vegetables, the most expensive of which were six bananas.

The Last Supper also highlights a quote from one of the participants, Motiar Rahman Gazi.

"We are left with one bucket of rice and some vegetables for our twenty-one member family. Our lands went into the river, and with every passing year, calamities are hitting us hard. There is little drinkable water left in the area, and now the devastation of this pandemic will kill us due to the food scarcity. When again will we be able to eat a proper meal? We do not have any idea," Gazi says in the caption.  

"One has to gather their own food here, be it a child, an old man or a woman. People's dreams have sunk to the bottom. Here, a dream is to have your stomach full of rice," Hasan said.

Salt, for which once wars were raged and empires were built, had now become a source of unending happiness for the people it is closest to.

Hasan's first attempt at docu-fiction explores this changing relationship with salt. His earlier documentary, "Salt", had dove deep into the topic, his camera snapping shots of a reality considered to still be at the fringes for most people.

But the facts keep piling up. Freshwater rivers and canals are becoming salty, freshwater fish are starving, salt is disrupting fish's diet and reproductive cycle, overheating is destroying human skin, reducing women's fertility and even increasing incidence of cancer.

In "Salt", Hasan captured the people caught in the crosshairs of the climate crisis: weary faces full of salt stains, cracked soil under their feet and bare trees in the distance. Hasan's photos show a salty world without hopes and dreams. The photojournalist testifies that even the sky there is black, a constant fixture in the doom and gloom of the changing world.

Noah's Ark

Noah's Ark is another fascinating manipulated photo in the series. In this, Hasan gathers all the animals present in the forest and puts them on a traditional boat. The boat holds the majestic Royal Bengal Tiger, the Rhesus Monkey and the Spotted Deer, among others.

"The Sundarbans can withstand all the storms. The forest acts as a natural barrier. But people are unjust towards it. Poachers kill the tigers every chance they get. In addition, due to the increase in salinity, the animals in the forest are also suffering. So I thought they needed a Noah's Ark now to save them from danger."

In the same series, Hasan also touches upon the so-called Tiger Widows, women who have lost their husbands to tiger attacks. Once such a tragedy strikes, society often outcasts the women, saying they bring bad luck.

One of the photos shows Halima Begum, 55, who lost her husband when he went to harvest honey.

"Since that day, I have not found peace anywhere I went. I raised six children and did everything to feed them. But people's hatred and bad behaviour was not expected. Everyone pointed me out as bad luck, as if I killed my husband," her words in the caption read.

Forced Migration

Another picture of the series shows a family of five members, who stand in water, carrying backpacks.

They go to Dhaka for six months of the year to make a living by breaking bricks in brick kilns.

Hasan said many families are moving to the city from Bagerhat, Khulna and Satkhira, unable to survive the now hostile climate.

"Every year they have to build a new house. So local migration takes place. People go from  village to village hoping for some shelter. When a village is flooded with salt, they must relocate again," Hasan said.

"People here don't have the opportunity to think about tomorrow today. The now is all they have.  They do not know why the sea is so shallow lately. They wonder why the wind whipped up a storm. They don't know who is responsible for this. Why does the wind become heavy and cause a storm? Who is responsible for this?"

Who is responsible?

Hasan also went to lengths to explain who was responsible for the climate crisis.

"Global warming seems to have a disproportionate impact on certain countries compared to others. Bangladesh is one of the unwitting victims of climate change, a direct result of global warming," Hasan wrote in an essay.

Pointing the figure at the hyper consumerist culture, he said the culture was much more prevalent in rich countries as people can buy more than those in poor or developing countries.

"Consumerism has a percentage up to 5.5 times the environmental impact, where the US alone emits 18.6 tonnes of CO2, Luxemburg produces 18.5 tonnes, Australia 17.7 tonnes, China 1.8 tonnes, while the world average is only 3.4 tonnes (Jacobs 2016)," he wrote.

In summation, Hasan showed that the people most impacted by climate change had little to do with, necessitating the need for quick implementation of the breakthrough agreement on the new "Loss and Damage" fund.

For his series, Hasan, a staff member of ZUMA Press and his wife Fabiha Monir, who works for the New York Times, stayed in the coastal region for nine days in September.

Hasan is a postgraduate in photography from Falmouth University, England. He holds an Undergraduate Certificate in History and Philosophy of Art from the University of Oxford and also has a degree in film and video production from the University of Sydney.