This project explores loss and the urgent human and environmental cost of rapid urbanization in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Through documentary photography shaped by a surreal visual language, the project records disappearing spaces and fragile communities, reflecting global urban pressures and questioning what progress means when memory and belonging are erased.

Copyright: © Jubair Ahmed Arnob

The jury is proud to award the Alexia Special Prize in the Student category to this work for its courage in moving beyond the conventional boundaries of photojournalism and for the remarkably original way it gives shape to a story.

The photographer chose to document the transformation of Green Model Town, a neighborhood on the rapidly expanding outskirts of Dhaka, Bangladesh, not by showing what is there, but by making us feel what is no longer there: the dried canal where children once swam, the concrete silhouettes where trees once stood, the silence where a community once lived. Through a dreamlike and surreal approach, the work evokes absence rather than simply recording presence.

The contextual research underpinning the project is equally impressive. Dhaka is among the world’s most densely populated megacities, growing at nearly twice the global urban rate, with an estimated 90 to 95 percent of its buildings constructed without full compliance with safety regulations. These are not abstract statistics; they form the invisible architecture of everyday risk. Yet the photographer renders that fragility visible without ever sacrificing poetic force to urgency, creating a body of work with a language entirely its own.

We also wish to recognize the broader ambition of this project. By telling the story of one neighborhood, the photographer poses a question that belongs to all of us: what are we willing to lose in the name of growth? And what makes a city not only habitable, but human?