From 12-15 labs between Shyamoli and New Market to four or five, with crockery in the other room

The owner of this 35-year-old photo business at the Lalmatia junction in Dhaka says there were 12 to 15 studio labs between Shyamoli and New Market around 2000; the number started falling after 2006 and four or five are left. A good studio employed 8 to 10 people in the black-and-white era and now employs two or three; the New Market area had 18 studios after independence and has one. Paying shop rent, he says, makes a studio impossible to run today — mainly those who own their premises have held on. He has shrunk his own business into one room and sells crockery in the other, without letting his long-serving staff go: "It is mostly attachment that has kept me holding on to our business." The Bangladesh Photographic Association told the paper the country once had about 300,000 studios and now has a few thousand, and that VAT on colour lab printing fell from 15 percent to 7.5 and was waived around 2013 without the trade recovering.