Rupert Grey’s love affair with Bangladesh continues

Ansar Ahmed Ullah
Contributing Editor,Shottobani

London: Homage to Bangladesh, a photo album dubbed A Memoir of a Time and a Place by Rupert Grey, was launched on 5 July 2023 at the Frontline Club in London.

The book is a powerful and evocative photographic portrayal of a love affair with Bangladesh by Rupert Grey, who has been visiting Bangladesh since 1992. He first went to Bangladesh as a London lawyer armed with three Nikon cameras and now, thirty years later, he is a photographer armed with a useful legal background. The catalysts were Chobi Mela, the photo festival the New York Times described as an ‘Act of Defiance,’ and its founder Shahidul Alam, an acclaimed photographer and Time Magazine’s Person of the Year in 2018.

This book charts Rupert Grey’s love affair with Bangladesh, including an epic transcontinental journey through India to Chobi Mela in a vintage Rolls-Royce, later portrayed in the award-winning Sharon Stone-produced film Romantic Road. His photographs, mostly taken on film, speak powerfully of the cultural vitality and energy which inspired Grey’s Homage to Bangladesh.

Rupert Grey is a libel & copyright lawyer, journalist and photographer. He studied law at University College London and worked variously as a lumberjack & cowboy in Canada, prospecting for copper in the South Pacific and searching for oil with a dynamite crew in the Great Sandy Desert in Australia, a job he landed by chance.

Becoming a lawyer did not prevent Rupert from undertaking numerous journeys over the ensuing years. He travelled on foot, elephant, camel and horseback, by dug-out canoe, bush-plane, dog sledge, vintage Rolls and modern Land-Rovers to some of the wildest places on earth. Some of these arrangements were more successful than others. The cars had problems with rivers, the camels went berserk and the elephant ran away with his daughters.

His photographs have been exhibited in the UK and Bangladesh, and his articles have been widely published in magazines ranging from Vogue to National Geographic. Alongside lecturing in many countries, he has represented leading photographic agencies.

Home is a remote thatched cottage in Sussex with his wife Jan. Together, they have taken their three daughters on many journeys to remote parts of the world, including the great mangrove swamps by the Bay of Bengal.