On January 26, a conversation unfolded that challenged long-held perceptions of Bangladesh by the outside world. At the University Press Limited head office, photographer and author Rupert Grey spoke about “Homage to Bangladesh: A Memoir of a Time and a Place”—a photographic memoir shaped by decades of return, reflection, and emotional investment.
Image
Published by Unicorn and distributed locally by University Press Limited, the book resists the narrow frames through which Bangladesh has often been viewed since its independence in 1971. International narratives have long leaned on images of poverty, disaster, and despair. Grey’s work proposes something far more radical: a Bangladesh alive with texture, dignity, contradiction, and irrepressible energy.
Image
In conversation with writer Sabrina Islam, Grey traced his relationship with the country back to 1991, when he first arrived with his wife Jan and their young children. One of the most formative moments of that journey was a week-long stay on a houseboat in the Sundarbans, hosted by Major Zia—a freedom fighter who chose to remain in the region after the Liberation War to work with local communities. What began as travel soon became something more layered, where personal memory intersected with history, politics, and landscape.
Image
The evening opened by acknowledging Grey’s many identities—photographer, explorer, and one of Britain’s leading libel and copyright lawyers. While photography and exploration seem natural companions, law appeared, even to Grey himself, a less intuitive pairing. Yet that duality has shaped his life: a legal career built largely around protecting photographers’ rights, and a creative practice driven by belief in the ethical power of images. He says that one’s camera is a flamethrower and far more powerful than a bullet.
Image
Grey spoke candidly about how Bangladesh has often been photographed by outsiders, with limited space afforded to local voices. He credited Shahidul Alam with helping to transform that imbalance through institutions like Drik and Pathshala, which have since become internationally respected centres for photography and media education. Their emergence, Grey noted, has reshaped not only who tells Bangladesh’s stories, but how confidently they are told.
The discussion also touched on “Romantic Road”, a documentary based on Grey and Jan’s 9,000-mile journey through India and Bangladesh in a 1936 Rolls Royce. Grey recalled how Sharon Stone played a decisive role in reframing the film. Rather than leaning into familiar visual tropes of South Asia, the documentary evolved into an intimate love story—centred on partnership, memory, and shared experience.
Reflecting on his own upbringing, Grey explained that despite a family history that included privilege and even an ancestor who served as Prime Minister of England, wealth was no longer a reality by the time he was born. Expected to follow a conventional professional path, he nevertheless gravitated toward photography, inspired by the searing images of the Vietnam War and their ability to shape public consciousness.
Image
For Bangladeshi readers, Grey expressed a clear hope: that the book would prompt recognition of how deeply unfair many international portrayals of the country have been. He referenced the infamous description of Bangladesh as a “basket case,” contrasting it with the vibrant intensity he encounters daily here. “The energy on one Bangladeshi street,” he observed, “contains more life than whole stretches of London.”
Image
That energy, he said, also shaped his children. His daughter, now an academic in London, continues to draw intellectually from the perspectives gained during those early travels. While Grey is careful to note that Homage to Bangladesh is not a work of formal history, it is grounded in memory, research, and long engagement—an archive of lived experience rather than detached observation.
As the conversation came to a close, it became clear that Grey’s homage is not simply to a place, but to the act of looking closely—and staying long enough for first impressions to dissolve. In doing so, “Homage to Bangladesh” asks readers to reconsider not just the country in the frame, but the assumptions they bring to it.
