I Have Been Here Before

“Her photographs are frequently ambiguous, perhaps like memory, not defining a specific place, or even a specific time. These poetic photographs are interspersed with other images that resemble her birthplace far across the ocean. I am reminded of Sean O’Hagan’s article about Roland Barthes’ unseen photograph known as the Winter Garden Photography: “Like all family photographs, indeed all photographic portraits, the Winter Garden Photograph is essentially a tantalizing glimpse of the irretrievable, a cruel reminder of “what has ceased to be”, and like them it evokes a past we often have no lived memory of, but also a sense of our own encroaching mortality.” So writes Douglas Stockdale for Laila Nahar’s book “I Have Been Here Before”.

In Laila’s own words: “This book explores my memories of Bangladesh through family portraits with landscapes, places, objects, poetry and texts. The individual and collective memories and displacement are weaved together. This is also the perception of separation and connection. 

I am looking back on my memories. Memories that stay with me in my dreams and consciousness, and those that almost fade. Sometimes, a memory is a lifetime through objects. Memory of the texture and of the ink. Memory of a letter from home… and… the feeling that I am home. Sometimes it is just the memory of the melancholy of the landscape and the mood. The fog blanket that envelopes from all corners and hangs over with enormous grey skies. 

I look for and try to reconstruct the eternal passage of time that belonged to me, sense of the invisible bond connecting my past and my future. It is the culmination of years of gathering, digesting, and distilling experience spanning across the globe from Bangladesh to the USA, and fleeting moments of connection with persons, places, objects and my Inner voice.