FIREFLIES

  • Dates
    2017 - 2017
  • Author
  • Topics Portrait, Landscape, Documentary
  • Location Dhaka, Bangladesh

‘Fireflies’ is a series based on a childhood memory. Inspired by Robert Frost’s poem ‘Fireflies in the garden’, the work carries out a search for the fragments of a lost childhood, in a land unknown.

One night during the time when I was studying photography in Dhaka, I remembered a glimpse of watching fireflies in front of our old house which was in Chhattisgarh, India. A blurry view of the specific memory, which was also dark & colourful, provoked a desire to explore the fragments of past in the present. The same night, I encountered Frost’s poem and I was intrigued by the way he had represented fireflies, that how they glow once that they almost become stars, but then they turn dark. It reminded me of the characters who appear differently in night compared to the day, who glow & become personal before going dark.

It became highly relatable when I thought about how we had to leave our old house, during my graduation. The construction works had changed the whole landscape, and as we moved I started to feel dislocated. A feeling of lost home was always there, barely touched. It all came back while reading the poem.

I started going out in nights, exploring & looking for those characters, who resonated with my memories of childhood. As the nights passed, I felt more closer and memories became clearer. It was a chance for me to touch the home again. Boundaries of geography & culture that separates lives vanished, I was walking a line between fiction & reality.

"Here come real stars to fill the upper skies,

And here on earth come emulating flies,

That though they never equal stars in size,

(And they were never really stars at heart)

Achieve at times a very star-like start.

Only, of course, they can't sustain the part.''

- 'Fireflies in the garden' by Robert Frost

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