Across Bangladesh's Padma floodplains and the coal pits of Jaintiapur, Sarker Protick photographs Leen, Jirno, Awngar, and Mr. & Mrs., four series built on the discipline of listening.
Sarker Protick came to photography through music. Growing up in Dhaka in the 1990s, he remembers his mother's singing and his father's record collection: the Doors, Leonard Cohen, the Beatles. His father was not a musician but, as Protick puts it, a very good listener. The phrase has become a working method. He enrolled at the Pathshala South Asian Media Institute in 2009, surrounded by photojournalists, but it was Robert Adams and William Eggleston, another photographer-musician, who told him what else photography could be.
Leen was made along the Padma, the river Bengalis call the goddess. Its banks collapse yearly; entire villages disappear inside a single monsoon. Protick returns and waits. A bride and groom stand at the sand edge in full wedding dress, gold crowns and burgundy silk absurd against the white water. A bare tree rises from the shallows, trunks pale as bone, a figure crouched beneath it. A man in grey walks to the edge of a clay cliff that will not be there next spring. The camera keeps the hush of an overcast winter afternoon.
Mr. & Mrs. turns inward, a portrait of his parents' flat in Dhaka made across the years his mother was dying. A framed photograph of a young woman, a plastic bouquet in a bronze vase, a mauve rotary telephone on a wood table. His mother seen from behind, wet grey hair against a white wall, a cotton blouse printed with red flowers. Nothing is staged for the viewer. The rooms hold what rooms hold: the furniture of a long marriage and the slow absence of the person who chose it.
Jirno, which translates as decrepit, records brick temples and zamindar houses stranded in rice fields across the delta, structures that a century of flood and partition have half-returned to the ground. Spires push through banana leaves. A tower sits in water like a ship run aground. The pictures are black and white and small in the frame; the ruin is never the subject, only the ground on which vegetation, weather, and the surrounding village do their work.
Awngar, meaning charcoal, moves north and underground. At the open-cast coal fields of Jaintiapur, Protick photographs board-formed concrete piers rising out of river fog, steel railway trusses bolted against haze, fields of charred timber on wet ash, a figure in red walking a slope of scree that was once a hill. Inside the pit he gets close enough to a burn seam that the lens reads molten red pushing through basalt. It is the rare frame where the work raises its voice.
Seen together, the four series function as one: a record of what Bangladesh is losing to water, to coal, to time, photographed by someone trained first to listen. The lineage is old. Adams in Colorado, Eggleston in Mississippi. The territory belongs to the delta, where the ground itself is provisional. Protick's earlier work on extraction, already covered in this magazine, anticipated the turn. A photograph, he seems to say, is not a shout but a held breath, long enough to include what is slipping.
