May 18th 2008.
A day spent [blissfully] watching [and photographing] Master print-makers conduct a workshop at the Institute of Fine Arts at Dhaka University on Sunday May 18th, by kind invitation of Rokaya Sultana. The workshop will continue through May 22nd 24th. Other artists will join in, and the final prints from the Masters and Students will be presented in an informal exhibition on the 22nd at the Bengal Gallery on 1st and 2nd June. I hope to be able to attend for a while today, and again on the 22nd. Images and write-up follows asap....  Assorted images [in no particular order] of some of the attendees and famous artists from Bangladesh and India. Acclaimed Bangladeshi painters Abdus Shakoor Shah [Director of the Institute], Rafiqul Nabi, Mahmudul Haque and also Monirul Islam who lives in Spain, Master print-makers from Shantiniketan: Nirmalendu Das and Pinaki Barua  are here as well.
Click the thumbnails for a full photo view.

«A Month 6 Artists and a Book»
SoFoBoMo completed today. Its done!

The intent was to photograph 6 artists [Saidul Haque Juise, Fareha Zeba, Smita Srivastava, Ujwala Prabhu, Rokeya Sultana,  Jamal Ahmed] at work, with the least amount of «set-up». Some people are less conscious of the camera than others, so I had to use a different approach for each. I tried to capture the persona and essence of the personality rather than make pretty photos. I hope that I was able to convey this and some of the intimacy that develops between photographer and «photographee!».

The finishing touches to the text assisted by Jyoti today. Many thanks! Thanks to both Jyoti and Ujwala who supported me from day-one, gave suggestions and assisted in the design. Ujwala, sorry for making your mailbox overflow with those 100's [or was it 1000's?] of emails! 

1. A downloadable PDF [around 18MB] is online → SoFoBoMo - «A Month 6 Artists and a Book» [It might be quicker to right-click this link and save the file to your PC for offline viewing].
   The suggested viewing settings in Adobe Acrobat are:
   View->Page Display->Two Up.
   View->Page Display->Show Cover Page During Two-up.
   Alternatively, set the viewing option in Acrobat to «Full Screen» for a full page by page slide show.
2. View the book online at → ISSUU [Requires FLASH].
3. View it at → SCRIBD

Preview the book:

SoFoBoMo chequered flag after this lap?
Good friend Ujwala assisted clean up the layout and tweak the cover design today. We did struggle to get Scribus do what we wanted it to do - and finally compromised on what we wanted and what Scribus could do. Need to feed it a couple straight shots of Java maybe. Shake it up and wake it up! Text, fonts, text box widths, master pages and the likes get messed up and worse when one edits a page... a glitch of some sort in the software. Made some progress with the text for the book but it is not complete just yet. SoFoBoMo for me is supposed to end by May 20th....that should be time enough to complete whats left to be done.