By Whitney Johnson, Director of Visual and Immersive Experiences
Countless selfies and photos of beach games and other activities, like horseback riding (above), are snapped at Cox’s Bazar every day, but photographer Ismail Ferdous knew his simple portraits with the sea and sand as settings would stand out, wrote Nina Strohlic in this month’s issue of National Geographic. “The things people overlook, I paid attention to,” he said, noting the tremendous variety of beachgoers at work and at play. Here, “you’ll meet people from 64 districts with 64 accents.”
Many Bangladeshis know Cox’s Bazar as a favorite tourist destination—and for Ferdous, who grew up in the capital city of Dhaka, it has personal meaning. One of his earliest memories is of riding a train to Cox’s Bazar for a family beach vacation. And more recently, as a photographer, he documented the Rohingya crisis. Hundreds of thousands of refugees from Myanmar arrived in the Cox’s Bazar region starting in 2017. |
