I was staying with friends, Paddy and Deborah, in Newry, Northern Ireland, who had kindly made their five-year-old daughter’s room available for me. Corrina was friendly and curious and would spend a lot of time in the room. One day, as I was clearing my pockets of change I had accumulated, she suddenly remarked, ‘But you’ve got money, but, but you’re from Bangladesh?’ The family had just returned from a trip to Bangladesh. Paddy was a development worker and they had visited many development projects. At the tender age of five, Corrina knew that Bangladeshis did not have money.
‘The Visual Representation of Developing Countries by Developmental Agencies and the Western Media’ was the heavy title of an early paper I’d written in 1993. Drik, the photo agency in Bangladesh we had set up in 1989, was itself still using the term ‘developing world’. Yes, we were trying to break away from how Corrina perceived us, but we were still looking for Western validation, and our survival still relied more heavily than we were prepared to admit on Western clients, so it was their lexicon we were using.
Corrina wasn’t being cruel. She was returning the image that had been instilled in her from an early age. That’s the part that stayed with me from this encounter – not that a child could think this, but how effortlessly she had assimilated it. We recognised the images that had created the ‘icons of poverty’ that Corrina saw in me needed to change. The term ‘Majority World’, which I coined in the mid-1990s, evolved over time as a response to this and similar experiences. Changing what we are called is clearly not the same as changing who we are and our conditions of existence. Yet, as this essay argues, naming can in fact manufacture the very condition it claims only to describe. What follows is an account of that manufacture – and also what it leaves out.
The above episodes also led to the poem on the back cover of my book My Journey as a Witness (2011):
I don’t want to be your icon of poverty or a sponge for your guilt.
My identity is for me to build, in my own image.
You’re welcome to walk beside me,
but don’t stand in front to give me a helping hand
You’re blocking the sun.
Yes, it was about identity, about seeing with a different eye, but the power relationships at play don’t stop there. While those of us at Drik had serious reservations about the racist and colonialist stereotypes regurgitated by Western media and developmental agencies, we knew we ourselves also had a problem. We were largely male, middle class, urban, and Muslim. Global inequalities needed to be challenged, but local power dynamics needed to be addressed too, including our own hegemony. So soon after we set up Drik, we helped form the first collective of women photographers. The women called themselves Onno Chokhe Dekha (Seeing with Another Eye). They produced strong, insightful work that did indeed challenge patriarchy, but they failed to confront their own (largely middle class) position.
Photo librarian Selina Akhter (foreground) and receptionist Salma Siddique work in the first office of Drik Picture Library, set up in what used to be photographer Shahidul Alam’s bedroom. The adjoining bathroom had been converted to a darkroom. Akhter went on to join the leading human rights organisation Ain O Salish Kendra. Siddique became the photo librarian of UNICEF in Bangladesh. Circa 1990. Photo: Shahidul Alam/Drik/Majority World.
The group Onno Chokhe Dekha (Seeing with Another Eye) was formed by Drik in 1992. Participants of a workshop facilitated by British Photographer Poulomi Desai from Autograph ABP in the UK, on a photo shoot at the Dhaka University campus. Photo: Shahidul Alam/Drik/Majority World.
This harder question accompanies the act of naming. When a group calls itself ‘Global Majority’ – Bangladeshi and Palestinian, garment worker and gallery owner, believer and atheist – what exactly is being claimed as shared? The label can flatten as much as it illuminates. A shared exclusion from Western power does not erase the exclusions we enact upon each other – of class, gender, sect, and geography within our own geographies. Onno Chokhe Dekha saw patriarchy with another eye but not class; naming a solidarity between women had not produced one between classes. Closing that gap became the work of the next three decades, one unglamorous project at a time.
So in 1994, we started working with children from Dhaka’s working-class neighbourhoods – several of whom had been pulled out of school and into garment factories, welding shops, and garages. We chose a name: Out of Focus.
In 1994, Shahidul Alam began training a group of working-class children from Mirpur in Dhaka. They started by setting up a darkroom in an abandoned tube well housing. The initial task was to find homes for the newborn kittens staying there. Iqbal Hossain (centre, white shirt) has since gotten married to Hamida Akhter Brishti (another member of the group) and lives in Italy where he runs a successful media business. He works regularly for human rights organisations like Amnesty International. Faisal Ahmed (extreme right, white shirt), now heads the Gallery Department at Drik. Most of the children are well-established professionals in Bangladeshi mainstream media. Photo: Shahidul Alam/Drik/Majority World.
Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, and the rest of the California circle had spent the 1930s insisting that photography’s whole moral seriousness lay in the sharpness of the image: stop the lens all the way down, render every grain of sand and fold of skin in total, uncompromising clarity. Out of Focus questioned the implied moral superiority of that technical prowess. The second question that Out of Focus sought to answer was who gets to be the subject? This question was answered by handing the children the camera and stepping back.
Sharpness, whether of lens or of political focus, was never the Majority World’s problem to solve. Who decided what counted as in focus was what mattered. Questioning one’s own positionality is not an easy space to navigate. Being part of the dominant group, being seen as the oppressor, one has to work hard to build trust, to reach beyond inherent prejudices, and to present to one’s own community a different lens to see the other by.
Contested spaces require strategies and infrastructure. Creating sustainable practices of contestation require strategy and infrastructure. To fight a war, one needs warriors, so the longer-term challenge meant building institutions that could create the conditions for resistance to flourish. As an agency that could act as a platform for local storytellers, Drik was the first building block towards this goal. Who told the story clearly shaped what story got told. Pathshala, the educational institution we set up in Dhaka, Bangladesh, on 18 December 2018, was built to train those recruits. We did not reject the outsider’s view – a fresh pair of eyes had value – but we rejected their exclusive monopoly on telling our story.
There were many in the West who shared our concerns and wanted to be part of this change. They slept on our floor, we shared bread. They gave generously of themselves. Our students never realised they were rubbing shoulders with some of the finest professionals of their time, including Graciela Iturbide, David Burnett, Martin Parr, Raghu Rai, and Robert Pledge. Hungry students, great teachers, and a cause are a powerful mix, and the institution went on to produce professionals who shone in the global arena.
The eighth edition of Chobi Mela, Asia's most significant photography festival, began in Dhaka on Friday, 23 January 2015. It was inaugurated at Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy by President Abdul Hamid. Mobile exhibition on riksha vans, complete with docents ply the streets of Dhaka touring a smaller version of the festival. Photo: Habibul Haque/Drik.
Our world, however, was not simply about the stars. Chobi Mela, the festival of photography we started in December 2000, was important not only because it was the first major international photo festival in Asia, but also because we took photography to the masses. Our mobile exhibitions on ricksha vans and satellite exhibitions, which toured by boat, bullock cart, camel, and tuk-tuk, ensured that if the people would not go to what they considered to be elitist galleries, the galleries would go to the people. It also allowed the work of young aspiring students to be shown alongside global superstars – and the superstars having to defend themselves when scrutinised by novices.
Our world, up to that point, had been about addressing inequalities at home. As Drik began to evolve into a solid platform for local practitioners, we started to realise our situation was not unique. There were underrepresented photographers across the globe, in less well-off countries, and even in well-off countries. Photographers of colour, indigenous communities, and many others across the globe were being marginalised; their voices remained unheard, and their needs unrecognised. The Majority World agency was formed in response to that need. Taking a more pragmatic approach, we registered in London – in the belly of the beast – which is where the clients were. Our sales and distribution was in Sri Lanka, set up when it was still a war-torn nation, and the technical support was provided by our team in Dhaka.
Supplement in the Guardian newspaper on work by the Majority World agency, published on the occasion of an exhibition at the Guardian Gallery in King’s Cross, London. 'Insider, Outsider?’ (3–22 July 2012) was Majority World’s first UK exhibition featuring seventeen photographers from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. Photo: Shahidul Alam/Drik/Majority World. Cover photo: Mário Macilau.
These were not four separate projects. Drik built the infrastructure through which local storytellers could represent themselves. Pathshala trained the practitioners to staff that infrastructure and carry it elsewhere. Chobi Mela redistributed visibility both in prestige venues and beyond the elite gallery. The Majority World agency then linked these local infrastructures into a transnational one, so a marginalised photographer in Colombo or Dhaka could reach a client in London without a Western picture desk’s permission. This is what cultural institutions can do: holding the space for solidarity, but also building the means by which a dispersed constituency can represent itself, encounter itself, and act in its own interests.
Meanwhile, the needs at home intensified – we were also pushing back against tyranny. In Bangladesh on the 24 March 1982, General Hussain Muhammad Ershad had seized power under martial law before taking the presidency himself; toppling him became our rallying cry, through publishing, exhibiting, and marching the streets. We soon learned that regular elections didn’t in themselves secure democracy, and our struggle continued against ‘elected’ leaders too.
Our activism and our resistance were working, and it certainly didn’t go unnoticed. I had been documenting the brutality of the pro-government armed thugs and the police against unarmed students. I was publishing online and giving interviews to international media. It led to me being picked up in the dead of night, tortured, and jailed. By then, however, we had built an international alliance. A massive global campaign for my release, which included over a dozen Nobel laureates and many other global celebrities, made the pressure so intense that I was eventually released on bail.
The movement gained momentum, however, and once ordinary people joined the students in the streets, it became impossible to stop. Even shooting from helicopters and armoured vehicles in the streets could not suppress the uprising, and the next dictator, Sheikh Hasina, fled by helicopter on the 5 August 2024 – six years to the day since when she had me kidnapped from my home.
I used my time in jail productively – I set up adult literacy classes, art classes, a musical band, and even started a vegetable patch. My fellow political prisoners were released after the dictator fled, and we’ve continued to campaign for freedom, while we collectively mentor the youth who spearheaded the uprising, grooming them for future leadership.
On 7 October 2023, things were brought into sharp focus. While we empathised with the civilians killed on that day, we were horrified by the genocide – Israel committed this with the full support of the US and many Western governments – that followed. We protested, sang songs, raised money for the Palestinians. I had been asked to curate the Biennale für aktuelle Fotografie 2024 in Germany and had asked two of my former students (Tanzim Wahab and Munem Wasif) to join as co-curators. My pro-Palestinian position made the German organisers of the Biennale nervous and they cancelled it. Since our activism had little effect on most Western governments and other allies of Israel, we decided to put our bodies on the line. In September 2025, I joined Freedom Flotilla Coalition aboard the vessel the Conscience to break Israel’s illegal naval blockade on Gaza.1 Israel’s anticipated interception of the flotilla had a series of effects that went way beyond what other interventions had achieved: 1) It forced dozens of governments into a position where they had to publicly demand consular access and release for their own nationals who had been abducted by Israel; 2) It triggered industrial action by port workers in Genoa, Trieste, Ravenna, Salerno, and Taranto, who physically blocked ships suspected of carrying weapons bound for Israel; 3) It created contemporaneous evidence of the IDF using force against the flotilla while in international waters, which UN human rights experts then cited directly, explicitly invoking the Geneva Conventions. Upon release from Israeli jail, we continued the campaign, speaking, publishing, and exhibiting around the issue of Palestinian freedom. The hypocrisy of Western leaders and Western media had never been exposed so nakedly before, and we in the Majority World were not going to put up with it.
Roll call at night aboard the Conscience on 7 October 2026. Mediterranean Sea around 200 nautical miles from Gaza. The Conscience was hijacked in international waters by the IDF in the early hours of 8 October 2026. Photo: Shahidul Alam/Drik/Majority World.
Palestine did not unify the Majority World simply by being named a common cause; it did so through the same kind of infrastructure Drik had been obliged to build decades earlier. Demonstrations filled a hundred cities in a single week. Journalists across the Global South refused the sanitised vocabulary and passive voice used by Western media to describe genocide and ethnic cleansing. Cultural boycotts cost institutions real money and real prestige. The flotilla was itself a physical infrastructure, built to be intercepted.2 Publishing and exhibitions kept the story alive once the news cycle moved on. Solidarity was, again, not a fact of shared identity but a set of intuitional practices that had to be built and paid for. In Bangladesh, our mentorship programme for youth leaders is building the same groundwork for the world we plan to shape.
The term ‘Majority World’ was coined to fight against erasure – it was a way of insisting that those written off as poor, backward, and disaster-prone made up not a periphery but most of humanity. Global Majority does related but not identical work. It emerged out of the racial justice movements within Britain and the diaspora, and it names something that is actively produced rather than describing a demographic reality already in existence. That same logic held for Palestine: solidarity was not simply named, it was made, action by action, organisation by organisation, infrastructure by infrastructure. The condition did not precede the naming. The naming, and the acting that followed it, produced the condition. That distinction is not academic. It is the difference between waiting to be represented by those in power and building political power yourself.
After coming out of jail, I had written a book, The Tide Will Turn (2019), which was inspired by a letter the writer Arundhati Roy had written to me on my 100th day in prison. It has turned in Bangladesh, with the removal of a dictator. It will turn across the rest of the globe with the freedom and justice for the oppressed.
This is a poem I’d written on the back cover of The Tide Will Turn:
No heaven, no hell, no everafter, do I care for when I’m gone
Peace here I seek, in this sand and soil, this place where I was born
As oceans deep, as deserts wide, as forests and fences loom
As children die, as lovers sigh, no cross, no epitaph, no tomb
As bullets whiz by, as shrapnel shard, as hate pours from above
As blue skies curse, the wounded I nurse, as spite replaces love
It is home I long, as I boundaries cross, a shelter that I seek
A world for us all, white brown short tall, the boisterous and the meek
That world is waiting. We can hear it call. It was never simply waiting to be found. Each time we named it, organised around it, bled for it, we brought it a little further into being.