Scenes of poverty are inescapable in a country like Bangladesh, where Western media and charities use them to generate outrage, sympathy and — sometimes — donations. That bothered Shehab Uddin, a former newspaper photographer in Bangladesh who knew there was more to the story than downtrodden people victimized by poverty, not to mention photojournalists.

“When photographers visit a country like Bangladesh we don’t bother to ask permission from the people we want to photograph,” Mr. Uddin said. “We have the power, with thousands of dollars of gear, nice clothes and a good education, and we think we have every right to photograph.”

Mr. Uddin not only asked permission to photograph poor people. He also moved in with several families and later had them help select the images that he would exhibit in their neighborhoods.

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This was not an abstract exercise for him. He grew up in a lower-middle-class family sharing two small rooms with 10 people. “In my childhood it was our dream to get sick because if we did, I could ask my parents to buy some plain bread and some sweets for us,” said Mr. Uddin, 45. “So I have a connection to this kind of struggle.”

The idea to take an immersive and collaborative approach came to him in 2012 while he attended graduate school at the Queensland College of Art in Brisbane, Australia, where he studied the representation of poor people in Western media by both foreign and local photographers.

Over the next three years he lived with three families: a homeless mother and daughter living on Dhaka’s streets; a fisherman and his family in the countryside; and a large extended family in the slums. They discussed how to tell their story. Sometimes he decided which photos should be taken and sometimes the family decided. Afterward, he showed them the images and talked some more with them. This approach changed how he photographed, from using color to avoiding sensational images.

“Sometimes as a photographer I would grab a situation and try to photograph it in a dramatic way that could give me good mileage,” he said. “But this time I failed to do that because I was part of the family.”

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Mr. Uddin lived with Jarina and her mentally disabled teenage daughter, Mali, outside a Dhaka railway station. She had grown up on the streets, and her two other children had died from illnesses while her husband, a rickshaw driver, abandoned her. She has survived by begging, stealing, working as a maid and, now, collecting recyclable bottles, cans and wire.

Because Mali, 15, has wandered off and gotten lost, Jarina resorted to chaining her to the spot where they live, an action that at first deeply disturbed Mr. Uddin.

“A 14-year-old girl being chained from morning to evening looks inhumane and cruel, but this is completely out of love,” he said. “They don’t have anyone to take care of her where she can be safe, and the mother has to work or they don’t eat.”

Mr. Uddin spent weeks with them, sleeping against a wall or going home to his family late at night but returning early the next morning. Jarina thinks of him as her son, she said recently in an interview at the railway station, and he calls her Auntie. They often talk about problems the mother and daughter face.

Jarina has never asked him for money, but Mr. Uddin helped Mali get medical care, which resulted in a diagnosis of cerebral palsy and epilepsy. He paid for her medication.

“It’s what you do for a family member,” he said.

The family that was living in the slums was actually better off than the others. The mother, Nurjahan, is a housemaid, her two teenage daughters work in a garment factory and a son works part time in a toy factory. They and three more relatives share a tiny one-room corrugated tin shack with one bed.

Mr. Uddin believes that Western media and nongovernmental organizations too often wrongly portray impoverished people as monolithic. That approach may evoke sympathy and open wallets. But he said they also need more: social support and education.

“Though all three families are very poor, these families are not always unhappy — they have love and they enjoy their life,” he said. “Poverty is not only about sadness, not only about sorrow, not only about depression. They are people like us.”

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The results of the time he spent living with these families were exhibited where they lived, and his subjects helped edit a selection of images. At the opening of the show outside the railroad station, large photos printed on plastic canvas were lined up along the very wall where Mr. Uddin had slept.

“Usually when we photograph poor people, they’re never allowed to see how we photograph them,” he said. “They had never seen a photo exhibit — here I bring the gallery to them.”

Just as he had walked in the footsteps of his subjects, so, too would the diverse audience that caught the show: To read the final text viewers had to, unknowingly, step on a patch of dirt that the homeless used as a urinal.

Afterward many people stopped to talk with Jarina as she stood nearby.

“Before this, nobody wanted to talk to us,” Jarina said. “But now people want to talk with us about the conditions of our lives.”

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