I am trying to understand the question of folk photography and international award winning photography. If we put them side by side what would we see? I raise this question to explore further study of digital folk culture, including digital folk photography and digital anthropology.
Through random Google search, I found names of international award winners in photography from Bangladesh. I just took those images as an example of what we consider an iconic language, taking into account the subject matter and the visual language. From this search, people can list some common names that have recently won awards.
In the list, we will find names such as the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) Photographic Competition, the Prix de la Photographie competition of Paris, the International Press Freedom Award, the Discovery of the Year Award or the Global Portrait Competition of Time and ASMP.
These competitions also gauge the success of the language and presentation of photo craft of Bangladeshi photographers. These images inspire and motivate to look at the crisis in a certain way. That success has been created and measured by the West. Ironically, in the post-colonial era, anti-colonial or decolonial studies in underdeveloped countries like Bangladesh attract supreme attention in the field of epistemology.
My concern is not to focus on those issues, but on what the photographers are capturing and what is gaining international attention. Already a small group of people who capture, analyze, and promote photography as an art form are concerned about those issues. That is why I am not bothering to share with the readers that the colonialists always choose hut and jhuggi as synonyms, which have been recorded as poverty and which have subsequently served to create and express local aesthetics. Greatly influenced the visual artist. Nevertheless, artists like dilapidated houses, old cars, emaciated starving people or hillbilly people living under state surveillance while also promoting the aesthetic for tourism.