When I started out as a photographer in my home country of Bangladesh, my focus was on social documentary. Later, I developed personal projects and travelled more widely but in 2013 and 2014, the political situation in Bangladesh became unstable, with attacks on protesters, secular people and LGBT activists. Images of atrocities were widely shared on social media and I developed a love-hate relationship with my own work. I didn’t know how to convey the horror of disasters, both man-made and natural, without it becoming normalised. It was a very dark time for me.
I took a step back and, early in 2019, joined the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) in Bangladesh as a communications officer. Three years later, I moved to WFP Yemen, and this is one of many pictures I took there, photographing alongside my comms work. I got to travel to five provinces – more places than many of my Yemeni colleagues will have been able to visit in the 10 years since the start of the civil war. Even then, I could not go to the north and journeys involved armoured vehicles and armed escorts.
