October 26 marked the 8th death anniversary of celebrated photographer Rashid Talukder. Rashid Talukder was a noted Bangladeshi photojournalist for The Daily Ittefaq, most known for capturing some the defining images of the atrocities during the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971. He was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Chobi Mela, an international photography festival in Dhaka, in 2006, and the 2010 "Pioneer Photographer Award" given by the National Geographic.
Talukder was a founder of the Bangladesh Photo Journalists' Association. He was born in 1939 in Baj Baj, near Calcutta (now Kolkata) in India. He developed an interest in photography while still at school, and by the time he reached class 8 in 1945, he started working in the darkroom.
Talukdar started his career in 1962, as a press photographer with Daily Sangbad in Dhaka. After working here for a few years, he joined the The Daily Ittefaq, where he worked for 29 years as a photojournalist and during his career he most notably shot the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971 against Pakistan and the photograph of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman delivering his historic speech on March 7 in 1971. As he feared for his safety, many of his photographs were not published until 1993 when he was approached by the The Daily Star.
Few photographers were able to film and publish an account of the events in 1971. Outside of Bangladesh, Horst Faas and Michel Laurent of the Associated Press won a Pulitzer Prize for best spot news photography in 1972, which appeared in a print as "Death in Dacca".
He was also a member of advisory councils of photographic organisations like Bangladesh Photographic Society. Talukdar died in 2011 in Dhaka, after a brief illness at the age of 72.
