In and around Khulna in four photos

Just a quick post as I need to get to sleep before I become awake again or before anyone decides to treat the town to another megaphone church service.

Thought I would post a few quick pictures from the last few days in Khulna, Bangladesh. We headed down the river today with some help from local cameraman Rajib. It was great to get out of the city and see some amazing countryside and meet some lovely people.

Photographs below in order:

Khulna evening fish market.

The view from the roof of our hotel.

The rice paddies south of Khulna.

The pedals I want for my pub bike at home!

View from the car

The rest of the light..and the first bit of beautiful light I have seen in Bangladesh.

Just sitting back not sipping on a beer (there isn't any) and taking five after a long day with our group working on photography and audio skills before heading straight into the field to record some material. We thought the weather was bad yesterday but thunder beckoned this morning over breakfast so when by lunch the rain had ceased we took the opportunity to visit a village working with World Fish. It's a bit of a trek to anywhere round here so it we packed up our vehicles and headed out in search of a story and to catch the rest of the light.

I'm currently hiding from the call to prayer underneath my lovely headphones. I'm sure I'll get used to it but it's driving me a bit insane at the moment. I think the speaker is on the other side of my wall..no seriously!

Everyone gets straight to work as we travel back to Khulna (I think Benjamin on the right is just playing games).

5089.1 miles

The view from my room at Lake Hotel Castle, Dhaka

It's taken a few days to get here, including one very long sit down in Dubai's infamously boring shopping mall airport type thing, one cold, about 20 paracetamol, way to much hand luggage and my old favourite, a plane with a faulty engine. I always think it's time to worry when the air hostess is getting involved in the mechanics of the plane. Thankfully they asked us to leave whilst they completed this task. Honestly my confidence was low.

The captain and mechanic have a go at fixing our broken plane. Not cool.

Bristol to London. London to Dubai. Dubai to Dhaka, Dhaka to Jessor and Jessor to Khulna. It's 5089.1 miles as the crow fly's and seeing as it's more for us it's been a really tiring trip. Especially seeing as I managed to somehow get a cold just as I left somewhere cold! I'll thank the British weather for that.. Well if I thought I was entering the opposite side of the temperature scale I was wrong too. There have already been calls to head to the shops to pick up a jumper and that wasn't even me. Even so this looks like an amazing place. Over a million people live here in Khulna and it's the third largest city in Bangladesh. It's about the same as Bristol in the UK and I am hoping that as I get on with work I can explore it a bit.

For now I've been doing a bit of work with the group I am here training from World Fish and having a bit of dinner. They are a really interesting bunch and it's been great to here in a bit more detail some of the programmes they work with here in Bangladesh to improve food security in this region.

I'll leave you with the view from my room. To be honest the picture looks better as the visibility is super low but hey that's what a photograph can do sometimes.

The view across Khulna to the north from my hotel.

Fish & Fish

For eighteen years of my life the only fish I would happily devour was that from the local fish & chip shop. I mean I have always loved fish & chips and it's still my favourite takeaway to this day, possibly one of my favourite meals.. So unless we were drenching dinner with salt and vinegar and wrapping it up in that day's misprinted papers, I wasn't interested. According to my parents I happily spent my youth referring to the dish as 'fish & fish', so I must have liked it deep down inside just not when it came to dinnertime.

So it comes as no surprise that I can remember quite vividly the first fish dish that stopped me in my tracks, and made me sit up and take note. I was at my Uncles in California (that would be you John - thanks again) enjoying the delights of the surf, the beach, my first surfboard and getting driven around in a lowered F150 truck (such a child!).. John suggested some fresh fish from this killer place on County Line that serves up the freshest fish, caught daily from the pacific opposite the restaurant. What with me being very British I felt it was a bit rude to say that I didn't really like fish so I shut my trap. What followed was a culinary delight though, Sea Bass sprinkled with flaked almonds, a generous pinch of salt and pepper and a hunk of butter. All wrapped up in foil and cooked to perfection on the barbecue of course. And perfection it was. Now I like fish, I said to myself.

I'm not the only person who now likes to eat fish. Statistics say that in 2009 the world ate over 120 million tonnes of fish. It's a staggering statistic and that rate increases by 6% year on year. So maybe we should be worried about running out of oil but we should also be aware of the rate at which the world eats fish. Some of the practices that directly affect fish heading for the UK markets were highlighted last year by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall on a Channel 4 series called Hugh's Fish Fight. It was heart wrenching, educational and made me want to act. It also seems to have made another 770,617...and counting people want to act, which is great.

I'm glad to be heading out to Bangladesh at the end of this week with duckrabbit to work on series of photofilms for a Fishing & Aquaculture research institute there. It's made me think about how important fish are to this world, for sustenance, to provide livelihoods and in the environment as a species.

It's also made me think about just how hard it is to get a nice piece of fresh fish nowadays. Thankfully my brother is a chef so I had the nicest piece of trout I have ever eaten on Christmas morning this year.

And if you don't know my brother then perhaps it's easier to just go fishing. Like James Brown here..

Christmas Goose

We had a very yummy Goose for christmas this year. We wanted to do something practical and discrete with the leftovers so we made this pie. It has pastry made from...yep you guessed it goose fat. Yum.

Even nicer when it's cooked.

October

Quite why it has taken me since October to get this into my computer and back out the ethernet cable plugged into it's backside I don't know. It hasn't made a bit of difference to the photograph and I like this snapshot of Rebecca (Harley...she is a photographer - hence the camera..) on a beach nowhere near you. It was pretty windy that day.

Food Inc.

I'm pretty passionate about my food, everyone else's food and the way we go about sourcing it. I think it's important to be responsible as we go through our lives taking photos or doing whatever it is that we do, responsible for our environment and the things we share it with, namely other humans and all those animals which provide a hell of a lot of our food. Even the plants, we should respect them too. They work their asses off for us keeping us all alive with their wonderful nutrients and all that oxygen they provide.

I can't help but get a little depressed sometimes when I realise that there are a lot of people out there who are not really that bothered about the next tree that's getting cut down as long as they have the latest flat screen tv. Not worried about an animal that's literally dying on it's feet to feed us along as they can read all about the poor thing on their shiny new iPad. Not scared to eat food that contains crap more crap and more crap because it tastes sooooo good. And just generally not bothered if we destroy our planet and disrespect every living thing on it as long as they can get everything cheaper, bigger and better.

This notion was revived in me the other day when watched the film - Food Inc. It was so good, so moving, so interesting and sad all at the same time I ended up watching it twice in one day. Ok once was on the train back from London but even then I had to fight back my emotions a little bit. When I arrived back I couldn't help but tell everyone I met to watch it and learn something, so I ended up watching it for the second time. Just as good, just as scary, just as disturbing.

Now I know a lot of people are not into watching documentary films about food nowadays, mainly because a lot of people have told me so. And whether that because they just aren't entertaining enough, aren't filmed in glorious HD or because they don't have Brad Pitt telling you to be nice to the world in them, I'm not sure. I have a feeling though that it's because people just don't want to hear the truth about the way their food is produced because it so bloody disgusting. And if they don't watch it they can ignore it for a bit longer. Well I want to see it all so I can make my choice with the food I buy and be responsible for the animals I eat and the way they have lived their lives.

Anyway my point was to tell you to go and watch the film, but I'll bring it back round to photography seeing as though I'm a photographer and all that. A point brought up in the film was that some US states were considering laws to be passed that would stop photographs being taken of industrial food processes. In Florida this year Senator Jim Norman put this bill forward

"[a] person who photographs, video records, or otherwise produces images or pictorial records, digital or otherwise, at or of a farm or other property where legitimate agriculture operations are being conducted without the written consent of the owner, or an authorized representative of the owner, commits a felony of the first degree."

See more here..

So if that was passed..it wouldn't be good for the transparency of the food system, or for investigative journalists/photographers...jail anyone? Bit scary though really that people go to such lengths to hide the very stuff that we eat three times a day.

Scary. Go Watch it.

If we need to end on a positive note, and I feel like we really should. It's so easy to buy good food that doesn't harm others around you, and you can start with your local humble and very great baker. Thankfully mine is amazing and here is a picture of Harts Bakery in Bristol. It's actually not even around at the moment and I'm making my own bread - it's really easy, really satisfying and only has water, flour and salt in it... not human hair like some bread..really that is a bit gross