The Journey of Ilyaas Alla Bashk
For most, Balochistan exists as a rugged silhouette on the map of Pakistan vast deserts, untamed coasts, and mountain ranges that guard their secrets fiercely. For Ilyaas Alla Bashk, a travel photographer from Pasni, these landscapes are more than geography. They are his identity, his muse, and his unending canvas.
“I believed in nothingness once,” he recalls, “but now I am a believer in one simple truth: what you put in comes out the same.” For the last eight years, Ilyaas has wandered across his land, guided by a strange pull towards art, culture, and belonging. Photography was never part of his teenage plan. Yet, like a river carving new pathways, life cleared obstacles and drew him to the camera.
Through the act of framing and freezing moments, Ilyaas discovered something profound: that identity is inseparable from the land. “If I lose my identity, I lose the very foundation of my livelihood,” he says. For him, each journey with his camera is not just about capturing landscapes, but also about holding onto his roots.
Ilyaas never saw limited gear as a limitation. A simple camera was enough to immortalize the breathtaking environments of Balochistan. His turning point came when a photograph of his won first prize in Quetta. With the prize money, he bought a drone. Hours of practice followed until tragedy struck when the drone crashed into the sea between Astola Island and Pasni, carrying with it 120 GB of memories.
Financial hurdles, though painful, weren’t his greatest enemy. The true challenge has been Balochistan’s changing security landscape. “Many of the areas where I once photographed are now red zones,” he laments. For a travel photographer, the dream is simple: to roam freely with a camera. But for Ilyaas, that freedom has been shrinking.
Ask him whether he found photography or whether photography found him, and he smiles. “My eyes have become lenses,” he explains. “I see frames everywhere, composing scenes in my mind both day and night.” For him, photography is more than an art it is companionship, strength, and renewal. “Perhaps photography found me,” he admits, “pulled me out of my comfort zone, and set me wandering through the rugged terrains of Balochistan.”
Balochistan’s landscapes are steeped in stories of beauty, tragedy, and resilience. For Ilyaas, the greatest tragedy is the death of stories themselves, when traditions vanish or places transform beyond recognition.
One such moment left him shaken at Hingol. The Tanak Koh cave at Sapat Beach, once a familiar subject of his photographs, was destroyed by the summer tides of 2024. “The cave no longer existed,” he says. “That day, I realized something profound: landscapes, too, can die. They evolve, transform, and carry time forward just as humans do, just as I do.”
To know Ilyaas Alla Bashk is to understand that photography, for him, is not simply a profession. It is a philosophy of seeing, of remembering, and of belonging. He is not just photographing Balochistan, he is documenting its heartbeat, one frame at a time, before the tides of change wash them away.
The photography of Ilyaas Alla Bashk has been exhibited in Gallery 8b2, Islamabad
