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  Linking Young Minds Together |
| Volume 3 | Issue 22 | June 05, 2011 | |
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Spotlight
Building a Society of Young Photographers Salman Rob When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence." ~Ansel Adams
And yet again, the silence is broken by 'Break The Circle,' a bunch of new ideas put together by young students. The aim of 'Break The Circle' is to break out of only one campus and one society and take it to the next level -- to unite a number of educational institutions and universities together, as one. Almost every university has a photography club, nowadays; but we hardly get to know and see each other's works. So why not meet them, and see their photographs.
'Break The Circle' is an exhibition which will be held at the Drik Gallery from June 10-14. The idea of organising such an exhibition was conceived a year back, soon after IUTPS (Islamic University of Technology, Photography Society) was established. At that time, IUTPS was relatively unknown among other societies inside and outside their campus. It was something that came out suddenly in a weekly meeting. Also, in the mean time they had two exhibitions in their own campus, where new photographers were featured. In several months, IUTPS was really growing with members and activities. In total there are 20 members and selected photographers from IUT who are directly involved with this exhibition. The strategy is to divide into groups and play different roles. They also arrange meetings from time to time where they discuss the progress on what should be done next. President of the club, Syed Ashfaqueuddin Priom, General Secretary, Faisal Xiko, Public Relations Officer, Towhid Khan, Treasurer, Ashif Ridwan, are the young students behind the making of this exhibition. "We are expecting it to be a blast!" they say. "Our success lies with the audience's response; if they enjoy this exhibition it will be a huge achievement for us. We are sending out invitations to well known personalities in the photography community to join us and make the event more appealing.
Our top priorities are promoting photography, popularising it further amongst the youth, and making 'Break The Circle' a successful collaboration of university students who are interested in photography." In addition, they plan on hosting such an event every year, mainly to bring IUTPS among the top participants and popularise photography among the youth of our nation, making a doorway for new photographers and gaining exposure within the art community.
Since the IUT Photography Society started off with its ventures, the members had set their goals to get themselves in the big picture -- cement their position among the established photography societies. They discussed, planned and tried out many ideas for almost six months to stage this exhibition as perfectly as possible. And here they are now, with their long awaited exhibition. Among the many plans they had, one was to decide on how the word would be spread among the photographers and how to receive the submissions. They had the online photography communities at their hand to help them out with this and not to forget, there was Facebook. So, the word spread out pretty fast. They set a deadline for submitting photos and after getting 1200+ submissions, they had to sort them down to half. They also had to decide whether they wanted quality or quantity for the exhibition, and as expected they went for quality. A total of 105 photos were selected for the exhibition. The participants were then informed and later a registration of photos took place at the IUT campus. They also let people register at Dhaka University (DU). In the mean time, they had to handle the title sponsors, the designing of posters and brochures, tee-shirts, booking the venue and so much more!
Syed Ashfaqueuddin Priom, President of IUTPS says, "For a club like IUTPS to be holding such an event on a grand scale, we first needed to convince the authority about the prospects of such an initiative. A meeting with the Vice Chancellor was held to discuss these matters and to our delight he gave us a nod to go for it. We then made the call for entry and received photographs within the next 4 or 5 weeks. We met with the photographers once the selection of photos was complete and registered them for the exhibition." Priom adds, "In March, we made a call for entry on different community websites and through our official website www.iutps.org, we received a massive response from photographers, with more than 2000 entries for the exhibition. Among these entries, a total of 100 photographs from 70 photographers were selected by the judges by the end of that month." The two judges were Ahmed Sharif and Saud Al Faisal -- Founders and Members of the Management Committee for Through the Lens (better known as TTL). "Which is a popular photographic society among amateur photographers."
He also says, "We approached them for this favour and they were kind enough to sit with us in their office and sort out the best ones.” Faisal Xiko, General Secretary of the IUTPS says, "Now we plan to offer students a platform to compete with others on a regular basis and develop their skills. So, we will be arranging this international inter university exhibition on a yearly basis. Also, we have plans on arranging theme based photography exhibitions and that too is already being processed. So, we are keeping our fingers crossed for that. We wanted people to know of our existence and that has been achieved. Also, we want to have good relationships with other photography clubs and photographers."
'Break The Circle' had five categories for photo submission -- Action, Nature, Life, Still life and Portraits. The winners of each category are:
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