Rupert Grey tells the story of Bangladesh with his stunning images
Review by Robin Hanbury-Tenison
Rupert Grey is an amazing man and this is an extraordinary book. Apparently just a black and white photographic book about a country, it reveals more through the intense images and the vivid pieces of text than a wordier volume could.
The author wears many hats. He’s a distinguished libel lawyer with a top London firm and a compulsive traveller to some of the world’s remotest places. Partly due to his relationship to the Earl Grey of tea fame, he famously drove a 70-year-old Rolls Royce across India to Assam and made a film about the journey, one of many in which he has taken part. But this book is about his dazzling photography, revealing how that medium can open our eyes to the reality of a crowded, diverse and profoundly interesting country. As Grey writes in the book’s introduction, Bangladesh has more than its fair share of adversity and magic, but it’s far from the basket case that Henry Kissinger once described it as.
Reading the book, the overriding impression with which one is left is how desperately crowded Bangladesh is, and yet how full of optimism, enterprise and hope. People, crowds of people, laughing, working, striving to make their way in a desperate world of poverty and flooding (water features on so many of the pages and the threat of rising sea levels is constantly in mind), they dominate the story told by the photographs. And there is great affection shining through in Grey’s manifest love for the diverse mob he meets, from the poorest of labourers to the photographers and politicians who represent hope for the future.
A book like this is important because it opens our eyes in a way that text books and even novels can’t to the reality of life in a developing nation bursting with energy and talent and facing seemingly insuperable difficulties, but surviving with a smile and a shrug. Every country should have a photographic record of its life and people like this one. There’s beauty to be found everywhere, but sometimes it takes a keen eye to find it.
