08/31/2024
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I would like to stop by to talk about the last 24 hours of my life. This will answer all my people living at home who ask me what my job looks like in the United States or how my work days are structured.
For August, my work schedule runs from 2 pm to 11 pm, five days a week. Once September starts, it will switch to 9 pmâ6 pm, which is how it alternates every other month. In the eight-hour shift, I could have two to three assignments or have no assignments at all. I drive to these assignments in the Dallas metropolitan area and remain present with my cameras to document the purpose visually. In that situation, I try to become what they call âthe fly on the wall.â In simple Bengali words, I am one of the âāĻŽāĻŋāĻĄāĻŋā§āĻžāĻ° āĻ˛ā§āĻâ ( media people), which often time is said in a condescending way in Bangladesh.
During my shift on Thursday, August 29, I was assigned to photograph one of the season opener high school football games in my neighborhood. It was my only assignment of the day, so it was supposed to be a chill Thursday shift. The game started at 7 PM and finished around 10 PM. Upon editing and transmitting my photos for publication by 10:30 PM, I went to an Indian restaurant west of Dallas to get some biriyani.
Around 11:30 PM, past my shift, when I was about to receive my order from the restaurant counter, I got a call from my director of photography that I had to drop whatever I was doing and leave for downtown Dallas as soon as possible. I was informed there had been a shooting in south Dallas, leaving one police officer dead and two others injured. Per my editor's instructions, I had to swing by the hospitals where the officers were taken and send in images and videos of any reactions happening on the spot. My biriyani was still intact, sitting in the trunk of my car while I drove around the city throughout the night, documenting the aftermath of a fatal shooting.
In journalism, you never know what is coming on your way. As usual, I started my shift that day at 2 PM scanning through the edits of a project and expected to finish with some football images in my contact sheet while I enjoyed my biriyani. Little did I know I ended up pulling off an all-nighter like college final week with no biriyani in my vicinity. I returned home at 6.30 AM, finally got some biriyani, and hit my bed. I slept for about six hours and went back to work again.
Now, why am I saying this? This is to paint a picture of what a day in the life of a photojournalist could look like. We photojournalists just donât take a photo. We wait and wait until things unroll in front of us. There is nothing constant for us. It is not an easy job, as most people think. Some of us plan to get a moment, while others get lucky. Scorching heat, rain, flood, or blizzard, you name it, we are always there to work. I donât know about other photojournalists, but my social battery always runs on low-power mode. I shift around my schedule so much that I never get a constant time to pick up something. I would probably blank out if you ask me where I see myself in the next two to three years. I recently started playing indoor cricket, but a good follow-up would be how long I can continue it.
When your only passion converts to your profession, it becomes hard to find something else. With all this being said, I enjoy what I do. It sometimes takes a toll on me, but then I go back, reevaluating the time I envisioned becoming a photojournalist in the first place. This stage of my life wasnât handed to me out of the blue. Being an international passport holder living in this country, I chose this life. I went to college for this. It is a privilege. I was thinking this repeatedly on my drive home after a 16-hour work shift.
Cheers if you are still hanging onto yourself and doing whatever you admire and love, which you once thought would be impossible to reach.
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