For Ismail Ferdous, photography and music are not separate practices but one continuous form of work. What begins in image continues in sound; what takes shape in rhythm returns through light. His roles as photographer and DJ are inseparable, two expressions of the same artistic logic grounded in rhythm, attention, and shared experience. This approach grows from the family and social world in which he was raised in Bangladesh, where care, hospitality, and collectivity form the basis of daily life. For Ferdous, art is an act of hosting: not about opening a space, but about creating conditions in which others can exist freely within it.

He describes both sound and image as responses to the same instinct: to sense rhythm before form. The camera listens as much as it sees; the turntable sees as much as it hears. For Ferdous, every gesture is part of the same continuum. His work is guided less by medium than by atmosphere, by the emotional temperature that allows presence to emerge, whether through the click of a shutter or the drop of a beat.

Throughout his photographic projects — The Cost of Fashion, After Rana Plaza, and The People Who Feed the United States — Ferdous works to make dignity visible within systems that tend to conceal it. His photographs are not depictions of disaster but invitations to proximity. The camera serves as a tool for exchange rather than observation; it enables contact. The same principle defines his DJ practice. Behind the decks, Ferdous composes through rhythm and repetition, building a shared pulse that binds people into a temporary collective. Each set, like each series of photographs, is structured around resonance, a space where distance collapses and presence takes over.

The series made at Cox’s Bazar extends this same intention into a lighter visual register. In a country too often represented by crisis, Ferdous turns his lens toward leisure and ordinary pleasure. His subjects, families, couples, friends, workers, occupy the shoreline as equals. There is no spectacle, no misery, only moments of calm and coexistence. The beach becomes a public stage where difference softens, and the act of being together gains its own quiet authority. These scenes reflect the same impulse that drives his music: to compose situations where people can inhabit a rhythm larger than themselves.

Composition is the connective thread across all of Ferdous’s work. He builds with fragments, sequences, pauses — with the same sensitivity to tempo that guides a live set. Silence and stillness carry weight equal to movement. Each project, whether visual or sonic, functions as a montage of human closeness, tracing the fragile balance between intimacy and collectivity.

For Ferdous, there is no division between photographer and DJ, only a shift in frequency. His photographs illuminate the structures that shape contemporary life; his music opens spaces where recovery and connection can occur. Both are forms of listening, both acts of care. The rhythm of the music and the light of the image move in unison, pointing towards the same horizon: the shared pulse of being together.

Ismail Ferdous (as DJ Îzma) will perform at Foam’s 25th Anniversary Party during Paris Photo on Thursday 13 November 2025. The event celebrates 25 years of Foam and the international launch of Foam Magazine #67 The Test of Time. 

ISMAIL FERDOUS (born 1989, Dhaka, Bangladesh) is a New York–based photographer and member of Agence VU’ (Paris). A National Geographic Explorer, DJ, and faculty member at the International Center of Photography, his work explores migration, labour, identity, and belonging across borders. Over the past decade, Ferdous has produced major documentary projects, including investigations into the human cost of fast fashion in Bangladesh and global displacement across Syria, Ukraine, Mexico, France, and Bangladesh. His recent book, Sea Beach, reflects on memory and collective experience through the landscape of Cox’s Bazar.

Ferdous has received the Leica Oskar Barnack Award, World Press Photo Award, Getty Images Instagram Grant, National Geographic Grant, and Alexia Foundation Grant. His work has been exhibited worldwide, including Les Rencontres d’Arles, The San Diego Museum of Art, and Leica Galleries, and published in National Geographic, The New York Times Magazine, GEO, and M Le Monde.

AYA MUSA is a curator at Foam. Prior to this, he was a curator and head programmer at the Nederlands Fotomuseum. In his work, Aya combines social developments with new exhibition forms, where photography is not subordinate to the context from which it arises, but at the same time never loses sight of this context. In this way, he gives photography a stage that goes beyond existing clichés. Since 2001, he has combined his work in the Netherlands with empirical ethnographic research into the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent. Currently, Aya is studying the photographic representation of victims of sectarian violence in the region.