"In Abul Azad’s visual dictionary the word ‘still life’ is elaborated as follows: the objects related to and resulted by a person’s life and these objects are seen arrayed in a certain fashion as providence would suggest and these objects would remain in the same way as if they were caught in and frozen by time."
- Johny ML
"Over all, the corpus of Azad’s work can be seen to have a thrust towards an archive of local micro-history at the level of personal memory and in that sense, his works add up to a kind of social anthropology of his land and its people, though not necessarily in the line of tradition of the objective documentary."
- R Nandakumar
"Azad travels through his sense of history with his conscious tool—his camera—and scales out a chronical of a text of visual history of a most troubled time in the human socio-political context of India."
- Kabita Mukhopadhyay
"Abul Kalam Azad's overindulgence with Barthesian ideas, and acts of scratching and drawing images, mainly images of violation like sword, torch etc., on photographs bring forth a picture of witchcraft".
- Rakesh Sinha
"Abul’s photographs (or work with photographs?) necessitate such a different approach for their successive readings. There is something blasphemous in the conversion of a news photographer into an artist who uses photographs for his creative expression. The blasphemy lies in his bold attempt to subvert the common norms attributed to a photo journalist. "
- Johny ML and Mrinal M Kulkarni
"Azad photographs with patience, he reaches the space of narrative, accomplishing pictures invariably close to the written word. This verbality in no way diminishes the pictorial curiosity and investigation."
- OV Vijayan
