The Photoseum Foundation, a government-registered foundation seeking to establish a photography-centred museum in Dhaka, has formally begun its activities with the first meeting of its nine-member Trustee Board on Saturday.
Ekushey Padak-winning photographer and writer Nasir Ali Mamun, founder of the foundation, will serve as the president of the Trustee Board. Mamun is widely regarded as a pioneer of portrait photography in Bangladesh.
The board comprises Mir Moinul Omar as general secretary and KM Haris Adil as treasurer, while Anisul Hoque, Dr Bimal Guha, Dr Mohammad Abdul Hai Siddiqui, Dr Saymon Zakaria, Dr Kudrat-E-Huda and Fakir Mohammad Abdul Mannan are members.
The foundation said its core concept is to establish a photography-centred museum through crowdfunding and called on interested individuals and institutions at home and abroad to extend financial support to the initiative.
According to the foundation, Photoseum is envisioned as possibly the first photography-centred museum in South Asia. The museum will be established in Dhaka as a public-interest cultural institution dedicated to preserving and permanently displaying people, time and history through photography.
Its planned permanent collection will include selected portraits of prominent personalities from Bangladesh and around the world, along with their handwritten autographs, manuscripts, diaries, letters and other unique personal belongings.
The museum will also feature artworks and self-portraits created by notable personalities, as well as previously unpublished audio-visual materials from Mamun’s collection spanning nearly six decades.
Rare negatives and gelatin silver prints will also be preserved and displayed through modern curatorial methods, the foundation said.
Photoseum considers photographs not merely images but important visual records that can preserve individual lives, the social and political realities of particular periods, historical events and memories of a disappearing world.
Preserving such photographs as historical documents for future generations is one of the foundation’s key objectives, it said.
The first Trustee Board meeting brought the long-standing initiative under a formal legal and institutional framework, marking a new phase in the establishment of the proposed museum.