Photography Lecture Series: Poulomi Basu

Tuesday 3rd March 2020
Edinburgh Napier University
Merchiston Campus
Lecture Theatre B2

Poulomi Basu is an Indian transmedia artist, photographer and activist. Her name sounds like ‘follow me’ with a ‘P’.

Poulomi’s work has become widely known for advocating for the rights of women.

She was raised by her mother in Calcutta, India and found early inspiration in the city’s rich cinematic history. Since then, Poulomi prefers the path less trodden. She has slept in the wilderness under a cloudless sky staring at a million stars in search of a guerrilla army whose story strikes right at the very heart of modern India’s global ambitions, through to divided families eking out an Alaskan existence on the last rocky outpost of American soil.

Time and again, she has found herself amongst ordinary people who quietly challenge the prevailing orthodoxies of the world in which they live: rural women in armed conflict, a mother's pain for a son lost to ISIS, to the wonder of a near blind child reaching for the light.

She created Blood Speaks to utilise the power of photography and visual storytellng/activism to result in tangible social change and amplify the voices of women from the majority world.

Blood Speaks placed menstrual taboos and blood politics on the international agenda, resulting in a major policy change: the Nepalese government criminalised the practice of menstrual exile, which is resulting in the death and rape of women.

She has also collaborated with Action Aid on the campaign #MyBodyIsMine launched on World Menstruation Day (2018); and, To Be A Girl, with WaterAid, raised £2 million providing 130,000 girls with reusable sanitary kits and build toilets (2014).

In December 2015, she shared a platform with the parents of the Nirbhaya Delhi rape victim talking about her social activist initiative, The Rape in India Project.

In January 2016 at the UN Young Changemakers Conclave, Poulomi spoke on the social impact of sustainable development with specific reference to her long-term project Blood Speaks.

Poulomi featured on the BBC World Service Programme “The Conversation” along- side Lynsey Addario as one of the most significant contemporary war photographers.

Poulomi featured alongside Hilary Clinton as one of the one of the Amazing women from around the world giving their best advice by Refinery29. And, in January 2019, the BBC World Service called her an “expert on menstruation.”

She was invited in January 2017 by Al-Jazeera to be a guest on The Mystery of Menstruation edition of their programme The Stream.

In 2019 Amnesty International noted her as an important and brilliant “human rights activists breaking the taboos surrounding menstruation” and violence against women.

Her work has been internationally exhibited and she won the Magnum Emergency Fund in 2016 and was a Magnum Foundation Human Rights Fellow in 2012. She was short listed for the Tim Hetherington Visionary Award and the Catchlight Fellow- ship in 2017 with Blood Speaks, short listed for the MACK First Book Award for Centralia, and the FOAM Paul Huff Award amongst others.

She is the Director of Just Another Photo Festival, a traveling guerrilla visual media festival that democratizes photography by taking it to the people and forging new audiences. Her festival was listed by BJP as 2015’s most Cool and Noteworthy and in 2016 in JM Colberg’s Conscientious Photography Magazine as an alternate voice of the ‘audience’.

Blood Speaks was selected for the Sundance New Frontiers Lab (2017), and she will be speaking at SXSW in March 2019 with her talk, Blood Speaks: Agency, Voice and Gender.

She is visiting lecturer for the Visible Justice & Collaborative Unit at the London College of Communication.

Poulomi is on the jury for the Photographic Museum of Humanity Grant 2017 Next Generation Prize and a nominator for the British Journal of Photography’s “Ones to Watch.”

Poulomi has also undertaken the 'Reporting in Crisis Zones' hostile management training at Columbia School of Journalism, kindly supported with a bursary from the Rory Peck Trust.

No tickets required, students, staff, and the general public are all welcome.

To keep up to date with this series please follow @photo_musings on Instagram.

Our final talk of the semester will be Jo Hanley, 10th March 2020, 5-6:30pm in Lecture Theatre B2

For more information about the Photography Lecture Series contact Sophie Gerrard Lecturer in Photography s.gerrard@napier.ac.uk