Handmade Artist Photo Books Week: Laila Nahar

Handmade Artist Photo Books Week: Laila Nahar by Aline SmithsonMarch 10, 2025

©Laila Nahar, Fading Away – Unbound and Free

Over the last several years, we have expanded our focus on books and zines, through regular features, interviews, and the Publisher’s Spotlight. This week, we turn our focus to Handmade Artist Photo Books, where the artist is in full control of the concept, design and production. I reached out the amazing book artist, Laila Nahar to not only feature her books today, but to have her share a week of book artists she admires. I was lucky to see a collection of her books at the Griffin Museum of Photography last summer.

Laila Nahar is a lens-based artist and bookmaker in California, USA. She lived her life in stark cultural contrast, born and brought up in Bangladesh and eventually migrating to the USA. She is primarily a self-taught photographer and book-artist exploring belonging, memory, cultural and collective identity. Her background from Bangladesh continues to shape her artistic identity and her work goes back to her roots in the Indian subcontinent, namely Bangladesh and India.

Laila’s handmade photo artist booksappeared in several exhibitions, including Griffin Museum of Photography, Photobookjournal.com, UnBound13! Candela Books + Gallery Exhibit and has won several awards, including Lucie Photo Book Prize Independent Category, DUMMY AWARD24 Shortlist, Athens Photo Festival APhF:24 Finalist, 19^th Singapore International Photo Festival Finalist etc. Her books are in permanent collections of several libraries and museums, including University of Colorado Libraries (Boulder), The Fleet Library (RISD), Boatwright Memorial Library (University of Richmond, Virginia), Museum of Fine Arts (Houston), Harvey Milk Photo Book Center amongst others.

Laila attended CODEX 2024 with seven of her handmade artist photo books.

Instagram: @naharlaila
How to purchase: send mail to ttakhi@gmail.com

An interview with the artist follows.

©Laila Nahar, Fading Away – Unbound and Free

Fading Away: Unbound and Free / 2022

This book is about the journey of stepping into the unexpected and the unknown – photos and writings about the lands of Nako, Tabo and Kaza, ancient villages in the backdrop of desert mountain walls and swelling rivers in the Spiti Valley in India. A place that stretched my imaginations, perceptions, and perspective. The land gripped me with its unpretentious beauty, bold simplicity, and cavernous wisdom. My heart, with all its desolation wants to hang on to the purity of this land.

©Laila Nahar, Fading Away – Unbound and Free, 2022

Tell us about your growing up and what brought you to photography?

My sister and I grew up in a simple and liberal family in Bangladesh in the Dhaka University Staff quarter. My father was a professor at the university while my mother was a literature teacher in a primary school. My home environment made me naturally inclined to Art and Literature. It is what lifts my mind to venture into the realm which is larger than life.

We had a box of color transparency slides and an old Asahi Pentax film camera in our house in the 70s. These two items were my treasured possessions. I was intrigued with the slides and used to go through each of those over and over. It opened the forgotten world which I was not a part of — the life of my parents before I was born. The slides, even though catching mold, were drawing fairy-tale photos of life for me. The Pentax camera was not functional as the shutter did not work and the thin layer behind the film cover was also coming off. But it was enough to ignite a life-long dream in a little girl’s mind. My dad tried to get it fixed, but the shutter stayed locked. Every now and then, I touched the black and silver camera body, thinking I will buy something like this when I grow up and I will make images. This is how it all started.

This fascination developed into a passion when I got my own camera after high school. I started with B&W photography and learnt printmaking. Due to the course of life and norm of those days, I got into engineering and walked the path that many have done, took the steps toward socially expected success.

Art remained as the passion of my soul but not the primary focus of my life. I continued with photography, using expired films which were available at a cheaper price. Eventually, I migrated to the USA to continue higher studies in engineering. My box of slides and the camera travelled with me. As any other immigrant having an American dream, I decided to settle in this country. The mid-nineties saw the onset of vast expansion of the technological world, and I embarked on that journey by starting a job in the high-tech industry.

At the beginning, the hi-tech industry felt enchanting — there was a feeling of so-called “creation”, the feeling of changing the world for the better. Soon, years rolled by that were accompanied by “success”. At the beginning it felt good, and purposeful. But slowly and surely the time came when I started seeing the invisible boundary of the world that I lived in; the system that I had been part of.

I found myself getting nostalgic for Bangladesh, searching for my soul, and questioning myself. Can I still connect myself to Bangladesh? How can I reveal that human landscape, which for me has never faded for a single moment? I have been visiting Bangladesh every year, trying to re-discover my carefree days and reclaiming the land and its people and continuing my exploration of collective memories. While working as an engineer, I had never given up photography; I in face embraced it. My interest only grew stronger.

During the COVID, with many other realizations, I could feel in my core that high-tech is not what I want to pursue for the rest of my life. I do not live in the illusion that I can change the world. But I needed to feed my soul; I needed to plunge into the world within me that I always felt to be the essence of my existence. For me, it was time. And so, I did. I retired from my high-tech career of 24 years in 2021. I became lens-based artist and bookmaker.

My box of slides and the old black & white negatives that I started photography with are still here with me. I made two of my books I Have Been Here Before and Will you come to Rome with me? using the slide-images, old negatives, current collage images and other ephemeral material depicting memories and belongings that bridge the past and the present.

©Laila Nahar, Rituals – Puja / Face to Faith / 2025

Rituals – Puja / Face to Faith / 2025

The 2 book-set on Rituals. Puja depicts the loving offering of light, flowers, and water or food to the divine – an essential ritual of Hinduism. In the ‘Face of Faith’, I was trying to grasp and capture what is there in the shades of rituals in the pilgrims of the old city of Jerusalem. I see familiar expression on every pilgrim’s face – on the western wall, inside the Dome of Rock and the Church of Holy Sepulcher. By end of day, to me, all faces in the sacred sites of Christianity, Jewish and Islam became one. It is painful to conceive, for centuries, religions fight over the narratives of Jerusalem and the custody of its stones.

©Laila Nahar, Rituals – Puja / Face to Faith / 2025

©Laila Nahar, Rituals – Puja / Face to Faith / 2025

At what point did you shift from work on the wall to work on the page?

As my work got more digital, I felt the need for my images to tell stories that would transcend to a tactile form. There are photographic works that require more than one image to be displayed. I like to style and thematize the images like a diary, with less traditional grouping of images and with a more personal approach. I started to co-relate images that had been taken five to ten years back to the ones I did the previous month. These experiments and realizations seemed more fitting from the wall to the hand, from the public to the personal and were more intimate. The book format, with its sequential style, builds a visual narrative that unfolds page after page, with the images chained and connected, creating a unique visual and tactile experience. I loved the whole idea — the design, the tactility, the 3-dimensionality, and the intimacy of them. This is what drew me to the book particularly to the handmade artist book format.

©Laila Nahar, I Have Been Here Before / 2021

I Have Been Here Before / 2021

The 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. I reconstructed the passage of time that belonged to me, a sense of the invisible bond connecting my past and my future. It is the culmination of years of experience spanning across the globe from Bangladesh to the USA, and fleeting moments of connection with persons, places, objects, and my inner voice.

©Lila Nahar, I Have Been Here Before / 2021

©Laila Nahar, I Have Been Here Before / 2021

As an immigrant, are the books a way to keep memories within reach or a form of a diary?

My background from Bangladesh continues to shape my artistic identity and my work goes back to my roots in the Indian subcontinent, namely Bangladesh and India. Majority of my books are themed on individual or collective and cultural identity, memory and belonging based on my experiences from Bangladesh.

I would like to give an example using my book ‘Living With The Tides – The Sundarbans’ and ‘In Stillness’. While I was growing up, I was naturally getting fascinated with the Sundarbans – the world’s largest contiguous mangrove ecosystem shared by Bangladesh and India at the southernmost edge of the Bengal Delta. The same applies for my interest with the river Padma. The rivers and rivulets, emerging primarily from the Ganga-Padma flow, create this incredible weave of land and water that is the mark of the delta – Bangladesh. There in the delta, along the shores of the Padma, where things are raw, elemental and primitive in the best sense. The people of this delta are the Bangalis. I am a part of this delta and this is what has shaped me. As an immigrant, I wanted to reconnect with Bangladesh. I made multiple journeys to the Sundarbans – this immense tidal jungle covering a mosaic of islands separated by a thousand winding creeks and rivers. My interest only grew stronger for this ever-changing but fragile habitat. Over time, Living with the tides – The Sundarbans became the handmade artist photo book of the Sundarbans. The focus was to show the slowing of the time in the Sundarbans and its mysteries. I showed its fragility through the structures of eight Leoporello panels attached loose and opening on either side, exploring the quietness of the mangrove ecosystem and the out of focus text and the image on end-sheet depicting the peril the Sundarbans is facing today due to climate change and human interference.

Making of the Unfolding – Color of Life series has been a joyous experience for me. The first in the series is the experiences from Old Delhi. For a few weeks I was wondering how I would express these vibrant waves of lives from Old Delhi or Dhaka — I wanted to give the reader the feeling of being in those places – surrounded by a kaleidoscope of life. I was combining multiple photos of varying size in each spread and trying to make the composite seamless as it transitions between images. It requires the viewer to use multiple senses as one journeys through the pages. The book tries to serve as a metaphor of exploring the tightly knit alleyways in Old Delhi or Dhaka or some town in Bangladesh through the unfolding of pages. It depicts a world of tranquility and harmony amid apparent chaos. It symbolizes the beating heart of beauty that is deeply ingrained in the depths of its earth soaked in rivers, monsoons, sun and the love and heartaches of life. It is where one leaves their footprint to lay the path for another; not to mark their territory. My mentor Susan Kay Grant noted it aptly which I would love to quote here— “As a viewer you have given me entry into a whole world of people, places and the many activities that make up life. The sculptural element is a powerful way to bring it all together and when displayed reminds me of a community or village of houses. I also imagine the sounds I might hear if I were there.”

A visual and tactile exploration of composite images that unfolds the everyday life of Bangladesh or Old Delhi – the part of the world which is, physically, far away from mine. So, yes, it’d be fitting to say these books are a way to keep memories within reach. As I noted as foreword in the ‘In Stillness’, ‘The book encompasses my experience of and longing for the life in Bangladesh. Yet, in those moments, it transcends the confinement of time and place. That moment of eternity and stillness in crossing the river, immerged into fog, plunging into the sea of life, and plucking a single strand of life.’

These books intend to offer a multi-layered reader engagement; these strive to be an exchange and a conversation, an ongoing form of giving and taking. These are the dialogues in the form of a diary.

©Laila Nahar, In Stillness / 2023

In Stillness / 2023

The 3 book-set encompasses my experience of and longing for the life in Bangladesh. Yet, in those moments, it transcends the confinement of time and place. That moment of eternity and stillness in crossing the river, immerged into fog, plunging into the sea of life, and plucking a single strand of life. There is no delineation between the river’s end and the land’s beginning. The land and the people rise and fall like the harmony of seasons. It unfolds the story of everyday life and rituals of the people.

©Laila Nahar, In Stillness / 2023

Who and/or what has been inspiring you lately?

Lately I have been much intrigued by the work of Sohrab Hura (paintings and photos), Vasantha Yogananthan, Star Feliz, Maciejka Art and Damien Daufresne. They give me everyday inspirations. I feel speechless every time I go through Rinko Kawauchi’s work – the beauty and the simplicity in it. Graciela Iturbide and Sergio Larrain – I keep on collecting their books. So many names.

Not directly related to bookmaking but, I started reading basic books on quantum physics – it is mind boggling and ultimate revelations. Immensely enjoyable.

©Laila Nahar, In Stillness / 2023

©Laila Nahar, In Stillness / 2023

Living with the tides – The Sundarbans / 2024

I had always been viscerally influenced by the Sundarbans, its mysteries, and splendors. There is something inexplicably awe-inspiring about this deep mangrove swamps like they exist in a time before the advent of mankind. The tides rise and fall periodically inundating all the land. The life of the inhabitants in this unique ecosystem is tuned to accept a slowing of time and a shift in perception.

Living with the tides - The Sundarbans-1

©Laila Nahar, Living with the tides – The Sundarbans / 2024

Living with the tides - The Sundarbans-3

©Laila Nahar, Living with the tides – The Sundarbans / 2024

Rituals – Puja / Face to Faith / 2025

Unfolding Color of Life – Old Delhi / 2021, Bangladesh / 2024

As I walked the old city of Delhi it was life at its infinite wondrous variation. Each nook and each corner are at its unique existence, yet no one would exist in its glorious beauty without the rest. A story of one linked to another and none losing its identity. It is a spectacle of color, fragrance, sound and above all the depth of life. The book on Bangladesh is the one going back to my roots. It symbolizes the beating heart of beauty that is deep engrained in the depths of its earth soaked in rivers, monsoons, sun and the love and heartaches of life – the unfolding, folding and linkage of life. Nothing is orchestrated, yet all are sung from the invisible notes of a great tune.

Will you come to Rome with me? / 2023

I am looking back on memories that were dear to my mother and those that I grew up with. Memories that stayed in my dreams and consciousness, and those that almost faded. Every few years my mother seemed to shed her old self to new roles but, essence of her never changed. It is a dialogue of a trip to Rome together; a journey that we never took. But it is a story of her presence in me and me in her. Wherever I can be, she can be in me and I in her.