Still, Reel and Reality Bites
The Photographic Odyssey of Anwar Hossain

"The mental success and the earthly failure," is Anwar Hossain's phraseology that sums up his life in retrospect. It also reveals an attitude and an outlook that hinges on the pursuit of life rather than material success. A man in "self-exile" since 1993, Anwar is frank about his dilemma in living in France where he finds a populace intoxicated with the energy of life as well as art yet trapped in a social infrastructure that tends to commodify art and every adventure that life has to offer. He believes that his whole oeuvre is the ultimate essay or the Iliad of the third world people and their condition. "Third world means humanity, it could be representative of that...," says Anwar. He has all the doubts stored in one nook of his discursive mind for people who are churning out works that fit the definition of the third world set by the first world. “There is too much dignity in your work... " was the accusation that Anwar had to stumble upon in his first few encounters with the first world dignitaries. In lieu of the plethora of images that cross the subcontinent volleyed towards the west, Anwar's humans, however destitute or encumbered they are with material concerns, seem to want to speak of life in all its primal glory.