Halfway through the interview at the Kamrul Hasan Gallery, renowned cinematographer Rashed Zaman got up mid-sentence, walked to a ladder, and climbed it to fix a light -- a shadow was falling wrong across one of the prints.
He came back down and picked up exactly where he’d left off, about light and time.
It’s a small thing, but it sits oddly next to what he says he wants from this show.
Rashed insists he has no interest in telling anyone what to feel in front of his photographs. None of the images are titled. He says whatever comes from the heart should go to the heart, unmediated.
And yet here he is, years after the shutter clicked, still climbing ladders to correct a shadow by hand. A man who says he wants to let go has not, in any single instance so far, let go.
That contradiction is the most honest way into this work.
Where the control comes from
Rashed studied architecture before he became a cinematographer -- first at the Middle East Technical University in Turkey, then cinematography at UCLA Extension in Los Angeles.
Architecture, he says, taught him to measure space geometrically. Space is something you can see.
He put it to me directly. “Do you think we can see time?”
I responded no.
He disagreed; he thinks we can, and that is through changing light. Light, for him, is the visible form time takes, the basic unit of energy behind everything; the creator, in his account, is the greatest cinematographer, and light is the material of that work, the way color is a painter’s.
“Light is how the creator paints nature”
He traces that conviction to two memories. The first is his maternal grandfather, who woke before dawn, bathed, put on attar, and sat by an east-facing window to write, morning light falling across his body while he worked.
Rashed, as a boy, would wake to the smell of the attar and the light on his grandfather’s skin arriving at the same moment; the light creating a different Presence, and it became the memory of his entire relationship to light.
The second is a painting by Abdur Razzaque that stopped him as a child, because he couldn’t work out how the sunlight in it was getting through the gap in the clouds.
He wanted to be a painter after that.
He says outright he never learned to handle a brush or mix paint; what he understood instead was the camera and the lens, and those became his brush and paint.
And that blurry line between painting and photography is very evident in his pieces.
Rashed, as cinematographer, is a man who has spent his life trying to control what light does.
But outdoors, working by nature’s own clock, that control disappears. He can only wait for it.
So, it tracks that he shoots almost exclusively in the half hour on either side of sunrise and sunset -- what he calls mystic light, the point where a day is arriving and leaving at once.
He talks about the whole process less like a shoot and more like a piece of music being played out: the work isn’t the camera, he says, it’s feeling something first, sitting with it until it’s fully absorbed, and only then reaching for the lens to say it back out loud.
The photograph, in his telling, is the last step of that sequence, not the point of it.
What he says he was looking for
He frames the whole project as a response to a much smaller, quieter problem: he’d stopped talking to himself.
Somewhere in the routine of a working cinematographer’s life in Dhaka, a handful of words had emptied out for him -- stillness, solitude, silence, collectedness, deep absorption.
He still knew what they meant. He’d stopped feeling what they meant.
He blames the city specifically, not people’s weakness: he claims that urban life doesn’t just crowd out light and sound, but that at some point an evolved human simply stops registering them, people stop looking inward, stop talking to nature or to God, and fall out of orbit.
Covid pushed him to act on it.
He’d been going before to the sandbars near Mawa on the Padma, using that flat emptiness as a blank canvas.
This time Mawa wasn’t enough.
He wanted somewhere with no road sound in it at all, on the theory that the more remote and quiet the place, the more clearly those words come back -- and the more honestly the light shows itself, with nothing competing against it.
He did not go out looking for buffalo or for the babla trees (gum arabic) that end up as recurring figures in the frame instead.
He’s since worked out a reason for them: the babla tree survives by adapting to whatever conditions it’s given rather than fighting them; trees, in his words, whisper; they don’t complain, they simply witness whatever time and space put in front of them.
The tree images span roughly the same five years, a stretch that overlapped with time he spent in Turkey listening to Sufi music and watching the whirling dance that goes with it -- the idea of orbiting around a fixed center, which now shows up in how many of these photographs are composed, with one still figure and everything else turning around it.
He reads the buffalo’s quiet the same way: not blankness, but resilience.
Two and a half years after the shutter
This is where the contradiction gets literal instead of just tonal.
Rashed shoots on camera, prints the image onto canvas, and only then starts working it by hand -- dry brush passed over the surface, texture pulled up in some places, saturation pulled down in others, a spray finish laid on top once he’s satisfied. He was still doing this in the days before the opening.
The five years of shooting is only half the timeline. Editing, printing, reprinting, and repainting took roughly two and a half more -- regular trips between his home in Bashundhara and the gallery in Dhanmondi to test a print, decide it wasn’t right, and start again.
A photograph in this show is less a single captured moment than a record of how long he was willing to keep returning to it, refusing to let it stay what the camera alone had produced.
None of that squares easily with “no title, no imposed meaning, whatever you feel is yours.”
What happened is that Rashed spent five years choosing exactly when the light could touch his subjects, and two and a half years afterward correcting, by hand, whatever the camera got wrong.
The absence of a title is not really an absence of authorial control. It’s the last thing he was willing to let go of, after controlling everything else.
Career-wise, Rashed’s route here was not direct.
From a young age, he wanted to be a painter, but the household he grew up in wouldn’t allow it, so he pursued architecture instead, practising it for three or four years before turning to cinematography. “Cinematography is painting with light,” he says -- and this exhibition proves it, blurring the line between painting and photography until it’s hard to say where one ends and the other begins.
He won Bangladesh’s National Film Award for Best Cinematography in 2016 for his work on Aynabaji.
“The Quiet Within” is his first solo exhibition, his first time putting his own name alone.
The photographs lean monochromatic, close to a single tone of gray-blue in most frames, with wide fields of empty space-sky, water, sand left deliberately doing nothing.
Horizons dissolve, so it’s often unclear where the river ends and the sky begins.
Buffalo appears frozen in some frames and smeared with motion in others; aerial shots turn the Padma’s sandbars into something closer to abstraction than landscape, a gray shape on a grayer one, no scale to measure it by until a single animal turns up at the edge of the frame.
“The Quiet Within” runs at the Kamrul Hasan Gallery, on the second floor of Bengal Shilpalay in Dhanmondi, from 4pm to 8pm daily, through August 27.
