Young photojournalist Munem Wasif’s quietly powerful images draw dignified attention to the injustices suffered by his Bangladeshi homeland, finds Diane Smyth

Munem Wasif received the City of Perpignan Young Reporter's Award for his work exposed at the Couvent Sainte Claire. Picture © Olivier Laurent

Munem Wasif is an extraordinary young man. Aged just 28 he’s already staged an exhibition at Visa Pour l’Image (having won the City of Perpignan Young Reporter’s Award), reached the final of the Prix Pictet (alongside world-famous photographers such as Edward Burtynsky) and join the prestigious Vu agency (he was taken on in April last year). But what makes his achievements all the more extraordinary is that he’s done so from Bangladesh.

He could be forgiven for letting it go to his head, but that’s not quite his style. ‘I’m happy and at the same time a bit afraid,’ he says, when I ask him how he feels about all the attention. ‘These situations are very tricky because you can get loose from your route. When people get accomplished they also get onto the route of success, and that can be a trap. If you get these things [prizes and awards] you can start to want them again and again, and so you start to produce the same story again and again. For me it’s crucial to calm down and just take photographs.’

Wasif’s exhibition includes images from three different projects – one on the effects of climate change in rural Bangladesh, another on the oppressed Rohingya Muslims of Bangladesh and Burma, and a third on traditional life and customs in Duran (“old”) Dhaka. The images are shot in striking, yet elegant, black-and-white inspired, he says, by the classic photojournalism of Josef Koudelka and Sebastiao Salgado. He’s drawn from their tradition of concerned journalism too, but he’s mixed it with a humility and strength of character that are all his own.

‘If I make something in my country for my people I will be more than happy,’ he says. ‘Maybe I will not be acknowledged by the whole Western media – that’s ok. Sometimes you have to find balance. I shoot in black-and-white; half the market is out. I do slow stories, I don’t go to the hotspots; half the Western market is gone.

‘But the story I’m doing on climate change refugees is one of the most critical issues in Bangladesh now. If the sea level rises, 50 per cent of the country will be under water. The people who are living in these regions they’re really very simple. They don’t have air conditionning, they’ve never driven a car. They constitute, I don’t know, maybe zero per cent of carbon emissions and global warming. But they’re in the front line of climate change. So although I’m shooting in Bangladesh, actually I think it’s a global story.’