This week-long workshop invites participants to venture into the nocturnal cityscape of Dhaka, to wander its labyrinth of streets and alleyways, to encounter its people and silences, and to discover what the city reveals only after dusk. Taking place in the heart of winter, during the days of the Chobi Mela festival in January, the workshop will explore the tension between visibility and obscurity, presence and absence, themes that are inherent to both photography and the night.
Dhaka is, in many ways, a city of migrants, a place where almost everyone has arrived from somewhere else, carrying traces of other landscapes and memories. To be a traveller here is not just to pass through, but to inhabit this in-between state: both insider and outsider, familiar and estranged. The act of photographing then becomes a way of peeling away the hidden layers that make a city, balancing subjectivity with observation, intimacy with distance.
Each evening, participants will photograph the city under the shifting hues of darkness, guided by discussions and exercises designed to attune their eyes to light, movement, and atmosphere. Daytime sessions will focus on reflection: group critiques, editing sessions, and conversations on photography as an act of wandering, witnessing, and storytelling.
Borrowing its title from Italo Calvino’s famous novel ‘If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller,’ the workshop invites a spirit of curiosity and uncertainty, an openness to detours and discovery. Like Calvino’s characters, participants will navigate the fragmented narratives and shifting perspectives of the city, crafting their own nocturnal stories through images.
