In the video below, 2014 Madeline Dane Ross Award winner Atish Saha, who shared the award with Jason Motlagh for “The Ghosts of Rana Plaza,” talks about his experience covering the tragic collapse of a garment factory in Bangladesh in 2013.
Saha, a Bangladeshi photographer, had never flown on an airplane or traveled outside of his home country before his arrival in New York to attend the OPC Awards Dinner in April 2015.
He was one of the first photographers at the site of the building collapse, which claimed the lives of at least 1,125 people and injured more than 2,500 more.
During his interview with OPC, Saha recalled grim conditions at the collapse site and trying conditions for survivors and families in the weeks and months afterward.
Jason Motlagh contacted Saha for a story about the aftermnath in Virginia Quarterly Review. Together, they produced a story and photo essay that grabbed the award judges’ attention.
“The story was painstakingly reported by Jason Motlagh, movingly photographed by Motlagh and Atish Saha and superbly edited and presented by the Virginia Quarterly Review,” the judges wrote in their comments.
“The piece renders in heartbreaking detail the humanity of the victims and their would-be rescuers, linking them to all of us through the clothing that Bangladesh produces in vast quantities for the rest of the world. Our cheap jeans come at the cost of their lives.”