Prof. Boerner's Explorations

by Gerald Boerner

  

“In India a girl child is a burden. The cultural preference for boy children has led to hundreds of girls being abandoned or killed at birth, or with the advent of ultrasound scanning, aborted.”
— Fazal Sheikh

“Women are offered for sale at a variety of prices. The price is determined by factors such as age, virginity, skin colour (the lighter the better) and the number of times a woman has been sold before.”
— Fazal Sheikh

“He believes passionately in improving the lot of poor people throughout the world, and women in particular.”
— Susie Says blog

“This [Sheikh’s passion for the poor] is difficult to do, as so many religious and cultural difference must be respected. He is a master at getting his subjects to trust and respect their way of life.”
— Susie Says blog

“They make us perceive our surroundings in a different way… this helps us to remain open to new perspectives and in our business as well, to ‘think out of the box’ and remain innovative.”
— Reto Francioni, CEO of the Deutsche Börse Group

“Influenced by trips to his family’s home in Africa, Fazal Sheikh’s work has documented refugee communities in pictures that reveal the rich cultural and historical ties in some of the world’s most remote places.”
— The Nature Conservancy

“When our great Islamic revolution succeeded, we thought our day of deliverance had come. Finally we would be free and independent. Afghanistan was released. But once again women were treated as the goat in the game, pulled this way and that by one faction or another.”
— Woman’s Testimony in Sheikh’s online book

“My husband died of a fever six months after we were married. He was 12 years old. I was only 5. His family said I was an unlucky person and I was to blame for his death. I was never taken into their household because they did not want me to bring them the same fate. So even though the marriage had never been consummated there was no chance I could ever be married again and I have carried this stigma for the rest of my life. … After my parents died I lived with my brothers for many years, but eventually they, too, died and 30 years ago, at the age of 50, I moved to Vrindavan, where I have lived in this home with the other widows ever since.”
— Moksha (2005), Vrindavan, northern India

  

Note:
The quotes included in this posting were taken from the public quotation sites, or articles about the author and/or his exhibits, which does not indicate that they are covered by any special copyright restrictions. This blog makes every attempt to comply with the legal rights of copyright holders.

This posting is intended for the educational use of photographers and photography students and complies with the “educational fair use” provisions of copyright law. For readers who might wish to reuse some of these images should check out their compliance with copyright limitations that might apply to that use.

GLB

  

Fazal Sheikh (Born: 1965)

Fazal Ilahi Sheikh came by his interest in displaced people naturally. You could say it was the family business. He was born in New York City in 1965. His father, though, was born in Nairobi, Kenya and his grandfather was born in a part of Northern India that is now known as Pakistan.

After obtaining a degree from Princeton University, Sheikh was given a Fulbright Fellowship to that took him to his father’s birthplace…Kenya. It was during that trip that he began to photograph and document the lives of refugees, displaced people and illegal immigrants. He has continued that project in several nations and across three continents; his photography has taken him to Sudan, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Somalia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, Brazil, Cuba, and the border of the U.S. and Mexico. Since 2001 he has been working on a series of books, all of which are published as part of the International Human Rights Series.

Fazal Sheikh is most definitely not a photojournalist, although he generally works with the classic photojournalist’s tool…a 35mm Leica.. The nature of photojournalism tends to focus on the moment; take the photo and move on to the next story. What Sheikh does is more traditional. He is not photographing a story; he is photographing the people who lived the story.

His Early Career

Fazal Sheikh ’87 had every reason to be confident when, in 1992, he headed to a refugee camp in Kenya to make photographs of the scene. The well-traveled son of an American mother and Kenyan-born father, Sheikh’s Manhattan upbringing had been privileged, his undergraduate years at Princeton distinguished, his career auspiciously launched with the Fulbright fellowship that brought him to Kenya. But when the plane landed and Sheikh’s photojournalist colleagues set to work forthwith, the young man’s self-assurance drained away. The scene was overwhelming. How could he render it?

Rather than tamp down this uncertainty and get cracking, Sheikh allowed himself to “fumble around” — a fumbling that yielded the very signature of his art: a respectful, patient, collaborative technique for portraying human beings in extreme circumstances. He got to know these Somali people shoved from their homes by violent conflict, who had lost dear ones and in exile continued to endure privation and threat; he asked for their “complicity,” as he puts it, in the work he was doing.

The newness of Sheikh’s approach was borne out in the arresting pictures he brought home, first from refugee camps in Africa and later from among Afghans displaced by Soviet occupation and the rise of the Taliban, impoverished Mexicans struggling to enter the United States, and, most recently, shunned widows living out their days in the ashrams of Vrindavan, India.

Many of these works are formal, yet intimate, portraits that bring the subject front and center while surroundings fall away in the near-abstraction of a spare tree in dappled light or the white-white of tent fabric. In portraits of Afghan children and elderly mujahedeen, one sees faces, close up; the intensity of attention to these faces — to the vein that delicately traces the temple of the elder, to the child’s hank of dark hair and ample, down-turned mouth — seems to say that there is no other person like this one anywhere. In their particularity the subjects become almost universal. In an image from the Somali work (opposite page), Anep Ibrahim Addan nurses her son Abdullai. She looks unsmiling into the camera, the tilt of her head complex, maybe a little playful; the nursing child has the far-off gaze of contentment, his hand curled around his ear. A daughter, Ayen, perhaps 7, looks down at the boy, her small hand resting in the maternal lap. We may not recognize the names Sheikh is careful to attach to these portraits, or the patterned drapery his subjects wear. But we know these gestures; when the photographer tells us son, daughter, sister, we know what he means.

These are not lurid dispatches from the disaster zone, but neither are they typical family portraits. They are too frank — that reflexive happy-face the camera elicits from Westerners nowhere to be found — and too accomplished, each “a very highly sensed aesthetic piece,” according to Peter Bunnell, recently retired as curator of photography at the Princeton University Art Museum. Nor does Sheikh neglect the political and cultural turmoil that drove these families into exile, or pretty up their suffering. On the contrary, text that accompanies images in exhibitions and in Sheikh’s five published monographs often unspools a tale of unspeakable cruelty and loss.

His book Ramadan Moon (2001) begins with images of leaves, sky, and moon that have a trembling, ecstatic quality, accompanied by quotations from the Koran and other Muslim texts. Then comes a series of facial portraits of Seynab Azir Wardeere (page 55) and, in her own voice, sweet memories of Ramadan in Mogadishu with her family. When finally we arrive at this subject’s time of woe, we nearly choke on its bitterness: father murdered before her eyes, raped and beaten in front of her children, separated from husband and daughter, betrayed by Dutch authorities who might have offered safe haven. Sheikh’s great insight about human nature is that you first have to see the person before you can fathom her suffering. Azir Wardeere’s victimization, he says, “changes the way you see her, but she’s not reduced to that one moment of trauma in her life.”

Sheikh’s audaciously humanitarian goal is to allow the viewer to see himself as “on an equal footing” with Azir Wardeere and other displaced people in poor, war-ravaged countries. His humanizing photographs surprise partly because they call to mind certain familiar images, but contradict their implications: for example, the “candid” journalistic renderings of famine-stricken refugees that fill the newspapers today — images meant to document events as much as people, and that too often provoke our pity, but not our identification, Sheikh says.

Afghanistan

Fazal visited Afghanistan a decade after the Soviets withdrew. For most of that decade, Afghans and foreign muslims continued to fight…but instead of fighting the Soviets, they were fighting amongst themselves to see who would rule. In the end, a group of religious students (called talibs) succeeded in establishing control. The Taliban ruled Afghanistan according to their interpretation of shari’a, Islamic law.

Fazal Sheikh’s photographs aren’t about the Taliban, though. Or about the Soviet occupation, or the destruction of Afghanistan’s cities, or the civil war. They’re about the people who fought. And the people too old to fight. And the people who waited while their loved ones fought. And the people who fled the fighting. And the children who were born in the aftermath.

Sheikh not only gets their photographs, he also gets their stories. He gets his subjects to talk about the village that was gassed by pro-Soviet Afghans, the brother who was killed in a firefight in the week before his wedding, the mother/sister/wife/daughter who was raped or forced to sell herself for food, the son who died during an ambush in some unknown pass on some unknown mountain.

These are faces that have seen too much, endured too much, lost too much. These are faces that are etched with the knowledge that they will see still more, and endure more and lose more. They endured and defeated the great Soviet Army, just as they endured and defeated the great British Army a century before, just as they defeated the Persians before that and the Mongols before that. At the time these photographs were taken, they were enduring the Taliban. Now they’re enduring NATO occupation and a resurgent Taliban.

Awards and Publications

The Heroes of Photography has honored Fazal Sheikh with a special feature on his images of the women in India. Click HERE or on the image to access a slide show of his work…

The recipient of numerous grants, most recently a 2005 unrestricted, $500,000 MacArthur “genius” award, Sheikh steers wide of the media as a means of disseminating his work. His pieces are owned by prestigious museums and well-to-do collectors, but he also has distributed thousands of books for free and published them on the Internet (www. fazalsheikh.org). Sheikh lives in Zurich. He feels increasingly alienated from an America he sees as intolerant of dissent in the aftermath of 9/11 and disappointingly resistant to placing that awful day in the context of a world convulsing with similar agonies.

How Sheikh came to his own empathy for the people he photographs is a complex affair. As a boy, he spent summers in his father’s native Kenya, and it was partly a fascination with paternal roots — his grandfather was born in what is now northern Pakistan — that motivated his first photographic explorations. Sheikh’s mother, a New Jersey native, took her own life when he was a young man; here is a measure of the “extreme heartache” that, Sheikh says, might permit any of us to empathize with others’ suffering. Asked about artistic influences, Sheikh names Lewis Hine, the documentarian of early-20th century New York, for his influence on such social issues as child labor and his aesthetic “knockouts.” But he dwells on Princeton photography professor Emmet Gowin, “basically like my family now,” because of the way he lives and works, and the way each is a lucid reflection of the other. “Emmet, day and night, handles his life in the same way that he handles his images,” says Sheikh. “You can’t erase yourself when you’re making the image.”

As he prepares for a new project exploring infanticide and the lives of girls left at orphanages because their parents didn’t want to raise daughters, Sheikh’s own life and collaborative work seem to argue for a different metaphor of photography, perhaps one that de-emphasizes the clicking shutter — the “taking” and “shooting” and “getting” of images — in favor of the aperture, an eye, that opens, exposing not only the subject, but the film, and the photographer.

[This profile was developed by using the two articles below. Being a more contemporary, young photographer, he has not achieved the status of being included in Wikipedia or sites like the “Masters of Photography”. He has been featured on PopPhoto.com.]

 

Background and biographical information is from Wikipedia articles on:

Princeton Alumni Weekly (PAW): Photographer Fazal Sheikh…
http://www.princeton.edu/~paw/archive_new/PAW05-06/07-0125/features_Fazal.html

UTATA Tribal Photography: Fazal Sheikh…
http://www.utata.org/salon/19589.php