LanguagesRasel Chowdhury has won the 2011 Ian Parry Scholarship (IPS) for his Bangladesh landscape series, Desperate Urbanization, focusing on the pollution of the Buriganga River in his home city of Dhaka.
The annual competition is open to photographers of any nationality who are either attending a full-time, recognised photography course or who are aged 24 and under. Chowdhury wins the main prize of £3,000 that goes towards his assignment. Alejandro Kirchuk was named as Highly Commended, and Jashim Salam and Valentina Quintano were given a Commendation. An Honourable Mention was given to Daria Tuminas. The award is named after Ian Parry who died, aged 24, while on assignment for The Sunday Times during the Romanian Revolution in 1989.
The competition was judged by Don McCullin (Patron), Tom Stoddart (Trustee), Kate Edwards (Guardian Weekend), Alixandra Fazzina (Noor), Jon Jones and Stephen Reid (The Sunday Times magazine) and Charles Parry (Ian’s brother). The judging is done as a process of elimination, so portfolios are removed from each round depending on their strength as potential winner. The judges said that the final round of portfolios from Institutions like Pathshala, Danish School of Journalism, London College of Communications, and Westminster, Ohio, Falmouth and Leiden Universities, showed such flair and extraordinary vision that the judges found it difficult to select just three finalists.
The judges felt that the overall winner had to be Rasel Chowdhury for Desperate Urbanization. His landscape images are concerned with the pollution of the Buriganga River, Dhaka. There are 700 brickfields and dockyards functioning on its riverbanks and tannery chemicals, human waste and industrial chemicals flow directly into the river. This constant source of pollution has created a breeding ground for diseases such as malaria, filariasis and dengue hemorrhagic fever causing serious health problems along the banks of the river. Low-income inhabitants are the worse affected, with little access to safe drinking water and proper sanitation. “I have an intrinsic relationship with this city and river as I spent most of my life in and around them,” says Chowdhury of his series.
Kate Edwards, Guardian Weekend Photography Editor, said: “Rasel’s conceptual approach and the de-saturation of his images works well to produce a very different view of Dhaka, which is intriguing and interesting. What really comes across is his knowledge of the area and his subject. There is a consistent distance in the images and yet every now and again you see figures interacting with the landscape as it moves from pollution to shipbuilding.”
NGO Save The Children is again sponsoring the award by offering one of the finalists an all-expenses-paid assignment under the management of its Film and Photography Manager Rachel Palmer. In addition, World Press Photo automatically accepts the winner onto its final list of nominees for the Joop Swart Masterclass in Amsterdam. The prize is sponsored by Canon Europe and The Sunday Times magazine, which publishes all the finalist’s work. An exhibition of the work will be held at the Getty Images Gallery in London from the 17 August 2010 for two weeks.
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