The photojournalist behind the frame: Munir Uz Zaman and the responsibility to witness
Munir Uz Zaman has covered war, disaster and displacement. The photographs have travelled widely, but the people he met and the choices he made behind the camera have stayed with him
The first instinct, when a huge explosion goes off nearby, is to run.
For photojournalist Munir Uz Zaman, that instinct once took him into an irrigation canal in Afghanistan. He was on patrol in October 2012 with the US Army, walking eight to ten miles a day through a landscape where danger could arrive anytime. It was the final day of his embed. He was tired, relieved that the assignment was almost over, and looking forward to returning to Kabul.
Then came the explosion. "It was very close to me," he recalls.
His first instinct was to run. He jumped into an irrigation canal. But after the first shock passed, another thought took over: he had to take photographs.
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He gathered his courage, climbed out and ran towards the scene.
"I started photographing," he says.
That decision, to move towards what most people would flee, has defined much of Munir's nearly two-decade career. From Afghanistan to Rana Plaza, from the Rohingya refugee crisis to the July movement in Bangladesh, he has repeatedly stood at the edge of history and human suffering, camera in hand.
His photographs have documented conflict, grief, displacement, resilience and moments of extraordinary courage. They have appeared in major international publications and earned recognition from leading photography and journalism organisations.
But for Munir, photography did not begin in a war zone or at a historic moment. It began with curiosity.
He was first drawn to what he calls "visual literacy" — the language of images, and the question of why some photographs stay with us while others do not.
"I was curious about how a photograph was created, why one photograph felt powerful while another did not, and what made an image aesthetically strong," he says.
That curiosity eventually led him to photojournalism. He worked with bdnews24.com, the country's first online news outlet, and later joined DrikNews. It was at DrikNews, he says, that his interest turned into a deeper passion for the profession.
Every profession, Munir believes, requires honesty, passion and accountability. Photojournalism is no different. But agency photography adds another pressure: speed.
A news agency photographer is always racing against time. A photograph has to be taken, selected, edited, captioned accurately and transmitted to the desk, often while events are still unfolding.
"There is no room for carelessness," he says. "You have to be accurate while working under pressure."
And then there is the pursuit of the photograph itself.
"You have to be passionate. You have to keep striving to make a good photograph, even when the circumstances are difficult."
Afghanistan tested all of those qualities at once.
Getting there was itself a long process. Munir first had to complete security training and then wait for an opportunity to join an embed. When the call finally came, he saw it as a chance to fulfil a long-held ambition.
"Covering a war has always been a dream," he said.
Afghanistan was unlike anywhere he had worked before: a different country, a different culture and a radically different working environment. It required him to leave his comfort zone and accept that risk was part of the job.
"I was desperate to do it," he says, even though he knew he was putting himself at risk.
The explosion on his final day made that risk real. The memory has stayed with him not only because of the danger, but because of what happened immediately afterwards. The fear did not disappear. He simply chose to move through it.
The same tension between professional duty and human emotion would follow him home.
Among all the disasters he has covered, Rana Plaza remains one of the hardest for him to revisit. The collapse of the garment factory complex in April 2013 killed more than a thousand people and left families searching for loved ones amid the wreckage.
Munir remembers the survivors. He remembers relatives crying for those who had died. Above all, he remembers the scale of human suffering.
"We spend a huge part of our lives at work," he says. "After our homes, our workplace is one of the places where we expect to feel safe."
Rana Plaza destroyed that assumption of safety.
For Munir, it was never simply a disaster story. It was about people, families and the sudden collapse of something most people take for granted: the belief that the place where you work will not kill you.
If Rana Plaza confronted him with tragedy at home, the Rohingya crisis confronted him with suffering on a vast human scale.
That story stayed with him for a more personal reason.
"I have a family. I love my children," he says.
For him, the pain of the Rohingya families was not distant or abstract. It was visible in parents carrying children, in exhausted faces, in people crossing into Bangladesh after losing almost everything. Behind every image was a family trying to survive.
This, Munir says, is where photojournalism becomes more than a job. A photographer cannot stop suffering. But a photograph can make it harder to ignore.
Over the years, he has learned that the camera creates both access and responsibility. It allows him to enter moments of crisis, but it also demands restraint, empathy and accuracy.
A powerful image, in his view, is not only about composition or timing. It is also about truth. It must respect the people inside the frame.
That responsibility became visible again during the July movement in Bangladesh, when the streets turned into a theatre of anger, resistance, fear and violence. Munir documented the movement as it unfolded, capturing both the scale of protest and the human cost behind it.
By then, he had already seen war, disaster and displacement. But every crisis, he says, brings its own moral burden.
"You cannot become careless with people's pain," he says.
For Munir, the work is not about chasing danger for its own sake. It is about witnessing what is happening and making sure those moments are recorded honestly.
That is why, even after years of difficult assignments, he continues to return to the field.
The camera, for him, is not a shield. It does not remove fear, grief or discomfort. In Afghanistan, he was afraid. At Rana Plaza, he was shaken. During the Rohingya crisis, he felt the suffering as a father.
But perhaps that is what makes his work matter.
Munir Uz Zaman's photographs reminders that history is lived by ordinary people first, before it becomes news, policy or memory.
And sometimes, to tell that story, someone has to climb out of the canal and run towards the blast.
