Pictures of the Day: Bahrain and Elsewhere

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Photos from Bahrain, Egypt, Afghanistan and South Korea.

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Pictures of the Day: Bahrain and Elsewhere

In order to view this feature, you must download the latest version of flash player here.

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Photos from Bahrain, Egypt, Afghanistan and South Korea.

Follow Lens on Facebook and Twitter.

A Street-Level View of Kuala Lumpur

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Che’ Ahmad Azhar sits so quietly in the corner of a room, you might not notice him. But take him to the lively streets of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and he becomes a maestro, conducting a symphony of noise, action, light and shadow in the best tradition of street photography.

On just three streets, no less.

Every Saturday for almost eight years, this former advertising director and landscape photographer prowls Petaling Street in Chinatown, Leboh Ampang in Little India and Pudu, a Chinese enclave. In courting the people who live there, Mr. Azhar, 49, has grown into a seasoned street photographer who can make sense of crazy cityscapes and vivid lives. Faceless street vendors, cooks and barbers, fortunetellers, security guards â€" all were once strangers, but became a new branch of his family.

Che’ Ahmad Azhar From “Walk of Life.”

I met him in June at the Obscura Festival in Georgetown, on Malaysia’s Penang Island. We both had exhibitions at Obscura, a friendly photography festival in its first year, and were teaching master classes. Che’ â€" also known as Chemad â€" has been a photography teacher at Multimedia University in Malaysia for 16 years, and his excellence has been recognized with numerous awards.

During the festival, he took his eager students into the bustling streets of Georgetown, stopping along the way to photograph scenes and point out interesting moments to the class.

But his series, which he calls “Walk of Life,” had already moved me with its intimacy and familiarity with the people and the cityscapes. I asked him: Why the same three streets?

“After walking the streets so often, they began to smile at me, invite me for coffee, to eat with them and tell me about their lives, some fortunate, some unfortunate,” he said. “They are genuine, nothing fake about them. When I mingle with them, I feel a sense of belonging.”

If anything, the streets remind him of where he was raised, in a small town near Penang. It was the kind of place where no neighbor was a stranger.

“People like this, middle class and lower, are honest about who they are,” he said. “They are cheerful. Their lives are lived out on the street more than the wealthy.”

In fact, he doesn’t photograph the upper middle class or the wealthy.

“They are not nearly as interesting,” he said.

Che’ Ahmad Azhar From “Walk of Life.”

When he left advertising and graphic design, Mr. Azhar began to paint, using a camera only to record things like landscapes.

“It was very meditative, but at the mercy of Mother Nature,” he said. “I started to think, ‘What can I do besides this?’ So I went into Kuala Lumpur and started shooting in a very random manner. I saw this was very interesting.”

He discovered work by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, Diane Arbus and Bill Brandt.

“I didn’t even know there was this genre called street photography,” he admitted. “I wanted to know the history of these people and how they worked, and I realized I had to keep going back and back and back and that I would get more.”

He later delved into documentary photography, especially the work of celebrated Farm Security Administration photographers like Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans. More recently, he has pored over the work of Alex Webb, William Albert Allard and David Alan Harvey.

He now says he has been reborn into an entirely new world.

“I was overwhelmed, and it gave me a new way of seeing,” he said. “I discovered the geometry in photography, layered, variety of subjects, the idea of moments. David Alan Harvey once said it’s never too late to be the man you could have been. I have done that.”

Che’ Ahmad Azhar From “Walk of Life.”

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