Salma Abedin Prithi

Salma Abedin Prithi (Bangladesh, b. 1985)

Dear Love

2011

Archival pigment print

6.5 x 11 inch image on 10.5 x 14 3/4 inch paper

Signed edition of 30

Through more than seventy scenes in her body of work Dear Love (2011–2018), Salma Abedin Prithi portrays shame-free joy in sharing love or desire, as well as the shame-free void of the absence of feeling loved. Dear Love includes intimate posed portraits of parent–child relationships, siblings, romantic partners, and best friends, shot in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Nepal, and Thailand. Describing her inspiration and collaborative portraiture process, Prithi explains, “Relationships have complex, multiple layers [that in some way overcome] the difference of class, race, age, and sex and meets to a divine line where intimacy stays strong.

Beyond Dear Love, Prithi’s photographic practice examines a niche that she describes as engaging the ordinary castes and people in contemporary South Asian societies as part of a process of protest and healing. Her projects explore conditions of domestic violence, gender rights, social injustice, and freedom of expression, and she focuses on vulnerability and psychological struggle. Prithi was a 2019 Magnum Foundation Photography and Social Justice Fellow, and she was shortlisted for the C/O Berlin Talent Award 2021