I grew up in Agrabad. Ice Factory Road was never home, but I’ve walked it thousands of times, enough that it stopped registering as a place and became something closer to a route. The kind of street your feet know before your eyes do.
One afternoon I had the camera up for no particular reason, and three men looked back at me from inside an electronics shop. Old CRT televisions stacked nearly to the ceiling. A speaker that hadn’t been plugged in for years. The kind of shop that exists on every street in this city and gets photographed by no one, because everyone has already decided there’s nothing left to see in it.
I had walked past that shop more times than I could count. I had never actually looked at it until the camera made me stop.
That’s the first thing I keep relearning: knowing a place and paying attention to it are not the same thing.
Chittagong: The City in My Hand
I don’t go looking for anything unusual when I shoot in Chittagong. What pulls me out is the ordinary. A tea stall that’s poured the same cup the same way for twenty years, a rickshaw puller on his fixed route, buildings so permanent-looking you forget they’re not.
But nothing here is permanent. That shop will close eventually. The shutter will come down for the last time, or the block will get torn up for something newer, and the three men who looked into my lens that day will scatter into their own separate lives. Most people walking that road afterward will never know what used to stand there.
I can’t stop that. What I can do is hold one specific afternoon still; this street, this light, before it became something else entirely.
Agrabad after dark is a different city than the one I grew up walking through in daylight. Yellow bulbs strung above a meat stall. Tarpaulin stretched tight overhead, catching the light like a low ceiling. A vendor caught mid-motion in that particular blue hour that exists for about forty minutes after the sun is gone and before the streetlights fully take over.
I knew this alley would look like this before I turned into it. Years of walking a place with no real purpose; camera or not, build a kind of map inside you that has nothing to do with street signs. In Chittagong I rarely decide where to go. I go, and the city tends to put something in front of me anyway, because some part of me already knew where to stand.
Dhaka: Someone Else’s City
Dhaka is a different kind of knowing. Or perhaps a different kind of not-knowing.
I live here now. I know the routes, the shortcuts, which roads turn into a slow crawl by six in the evening. But when I lift the camera in Dhaka, something in me is still a visitor. My eyes move the way they do in a city I haven’t fully earned; alert, slightly unsure, curious about what’s around the next corner instead of already certain of it.
I found this frame in Mirpur without looking for it. A boy in a white kurta crossing an open stretch of ground, a man balanced along a fence ahead of him, the entire sky behind them burning orange and gold like the day itself was ending in flames. I didn’t know that field existed until I turned a corner and it was simply there. I didn’t know a boy in white would walk across it at exactly that minute. I was only present, paying attention, in a city that hadn’t yet taught me to stop noticing it.
Maybe that’s the quiet trade. Knowing a place too well can make you stop seeing it. Not knowing it enough keeps your eyes open, almost without your permission.
The Turag River at dusk carries a sadness I don’t think I would feel the same way in Chittagong. A fisherman sitting still on dark water. A brick kiln chimney behind him, smoking quietly into a sky gone entirely orange. It is beautiful the way someone else’s memory can be beautiful, visible, almost touchable, but never quite belonging to you.
A number of my Dhaka photographs carry that same quality. Not distant, exactly I was there, present, camera in hand but there is a narrow gap that never fully closes. I am not sure I want it to. That small distance may be exactly what keeps me looking at this city the way I do: without assuming I already know what I will find.
What the Camera Keeps Teaching Me
It does not make me a local in Dhaka. It does not let me stay a visitor in Chittagong either. Somehow it holds me as both, at once.
In Chittagong, it strips away the comfort of familiarity and reveals how much has quietly shifted beneath a surface I assumed was fixed. The shop. The road. The corner I have passed my entire life. None of it was ever as still as it looked, I was simply moving too fast, or too accustomed to it, to notice the change happening in plain sight.
In Dhaka, the camera does the opposite. It slows me down inside a city that would otherwise pass by as a blur, and turns the discomfort of not-knowing into something closer to attention.
Different cities. The same lesson, in different clothing: a place only opens itself to you once you stop assuming you already know what it looks like.
The Street That Keeps Changing While I’m Looking At It
I still think about those three men on Ice Factory Road. The way they looked into the lens; not posing, simply pausing, caught between whatever they were doing before I arrived and whatever came after I left.
I don’t know their names. I don’t know if that shop still stands. But I have one afternoon of it; this road, this light, this day because I stopped walking long enough to actually look.
No city stays the same twice. The one I grew up beside has been quietly changing beneath my feet this entire time, even when it looked exactly as I remembered it. The one I live in now already feels less like a stranger’s city than it did a year ago.
The camera does not really give me the city. It only proves that I was paying attention to the version of it that existed while I was there.
Great content! Keep up the good work!
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