When two rivers meet: Inside Nasir Ali Mamun’s Photoseum of memory

This exhibition, titled 'Photoseum: Life of Poetree,' is the 66th time Nasir Ali Mamun has stood before the public to share his life's work. But this time, the vibe is more urgent, more personal. It feels less like a gallery show and more like an open letter to a nation that is prone to forgetting its heroes. The focus is on two men who occupied the very center of the Bengali soul, two pillars of Bangladeshi literature: Shamsur Rahman and Al Mahmud.

Walking into the Photoseum at Alliance Française de Dhaka, you are not just looking at photographs of two poets who are not with us anymore. You are standing in the middle of a long-overdue conversation.

For decades, these two were the sun and the moon of our literary sky. They did not often occupy the space of thought, did not always see eye to eye. Shamsur Rahman was the voice of the city's grit, of the pavement, of the modern, existential ache of Dhaka, and of the secular heartbeat of a rising nation. 

Al Mahmud was the scent of the soil, the mysticism of the riverbank, and the folk-rhythms of the village. They were ideological opposites, and for a long time, the silence between them was as famous as their poetry.

Which is why what Nasir Ali Mamun has done here is remarkable. 

He has taken that silence and filled it with light. The exhibition features sixty photographs, many of them rare, and unpublished video footage that feels like a whispered secret from the past. 

You see Shamsur Rahman in his quiet moments of intellectual solitude, his face—a map of the moral struggles he wrote about. Then you see Al Mahmud, whose eyes in these portraits seem to carry the weight of the entire landscape he so beautifully described. 

PQ: "Shamsur Rahman and Al Mahmud might seem like poets of two different lines, like the river Padma and the Jamuna. But just how these rivers unite in confluence and share one stream, these two poets also have that shared world among themselves, and Nasir Ali Mamun was the first to notice it."

Anisul Hoque, Writer and Journalist

The most striking part of the exhibition is the documentation of 31 May 2004. This was the day Nasir Ali Mamun finally convinced these two titans to sit in the same room. At Shamsur Rahman's home in Shyamoli, the cameras rolled and the shutters clicked. In those images, you don't see two rivals; you see two elderly men, two masters of the word, finding a way back to each other.

At the inauguration, the writer Anisul Hoque put this into words that perfectly captured the atmosphere of the room. "Shamsur Rahman and Al Mahmud might seem like poets of two different lines, like the river Padma and the Jamuna,"Anisul said. 

"But just how these rivers unite in confluence and share one stream, these two poets also have that shared world among themselves, and Nasir Ali Mamun was the first to notice it. This documentary photograph is very important."

That river metaphor stays with you as you walk through the gallery. You realise that Nasir Ali Mamun isn't just a photographer; he is the bridge that allowed those two rivers to meet. He didn't just take their pictures; he understood the current that ran beneath both of them.

But there is a restlessness in Nasir Ali Mamun that goes beyond exhibition. He is a man looking at the horizon. He knows that paper yellows and negatives brittle if they aren't cared for. This is why he has titled the exhibition Photoseum. It is a word he invented because the word "exhibition" is not big enough for his ambition.

"The exhibition title is Photoseum because in Bangladesh we don't have any photo museum though we have a few museums," Nasir Ali Mamun explained during the opening, surrounded by friends and admirers like the editor Matiur Rahman, the artist Monirul Islam, and the French Ambassador Jean-Marc Séré-Charlet. 

"And I have a collection of photos which are worthy of preservation. With this exhibition, the effort has been started. So I want to call for support from everyone who is willing to contribute in this effort."

Photoseum: Life of Poetree runs at Alliance Française de Dhaka until 16 April. It is a rare chance to see the Padma and the Jamuna of our literature flowing together in the same frame. It is also a chance to hear the plea of a man who has given his life to the camera, asking us to help him build a place where our collective memory can finally rest and be safe. Nasir Ali Mamun has caught the light; now it is up to us to make sure the room stays lit.