Living the questions

Paul Weideman |

10/9/2008 - 10/10/08

Fazal Sheikh's photojournalism depends not just on depictions of displaced peoples but on a deep understanding of their lives and stories. He has brought to the greater world hundreds of stunning portraits of individuals driven from their homelands by famine, drought, and civil war. Accompanying these photos in his books and exhibitions are segments of his interviews with the people he photographs and his own observations, which help make the refugees' experiences more immediate for the viewer.

Sheikh lectures at the Santa Fe Art Institute on Monday, Oct. 13, as part of its Outsider: Tourism, Migration, and Exile series and will give workshops at some of the city's schools. He peppers his projects with photographs of local landscapes and dwellings, but the portrait stands out as his central statement. "I think if you're going to get to anything heroic, it sort of has to be through this specificity of an individual story and gaze," he said in an interview from his studio in Zurich, Switzerland. "I'm most interested in listening to other peoples' voices and stories, and then standing back as best I can to let that happen, and at times fill in the gaps with my own writing or text about delving into my own heritage, things like that."

Fazal Ilahi Sheikh, who was born in New York City, has roots in Kenya, where his father was born, and in an area of what was northern India but is now part of Pakistan. These are two of the places he has investigated in his photography.

Sheikh photographed Afghan refugees fleeing the Soviet invasion of their country and victims of conflicts in Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, Mozambique, and Rwanda in refugee camps in neighboring nations. He examined the spiritual beliefs of migrant workers in Brazil and the stories of Mexicans crossing into the United States. And, in his most recent projects, he has investigated the lives of women in India.

The newest of his six books are Moksha ("heaven" in Hindi), published in 2005, and 2007's Ladli ("beloved daughter" in Hindi). For the first, Sheikh traveled to the holy city of Vrindavan, which for hundreds of years has been a haven for India's widows, women rejected by their families and condemned by repressive marriage laws. "In Vrindavan, they live in the embrace of their god Krishna, believing if they worship there until the time they die, they'll be free from the cycle of death and rebirth," the photographer said.

While at work on that project, Sheikh discovered another harrowing story, this time concerning the young women of India. If they are even permitted to survive by parents who desire male children, he said, many are forced into prostitution or, if married, may later be murdered if they are thought to fall below expectations.

"Ladli is quite political," Sheikh said. "At times the more conservative religious elements are rather dismissive about people speaking directly about practices that should be revisited and refined. For instance, in India they estimate that 500,000 female fetuses are aborted each year and that in the last 20 years you have 10 million young women lost."

Online editions of Moksha and Ladli may be viewed for free on Sheikh's Web site, fazalsheikh.org. They are part of his International Human Rights Series, which he established at the beginning of the millennium to reach a wider audience. "I still produce books with traditional publishing companies, but my main focus is to engage with projects in alternative fashions, including the Internet and other means of distribution," he said.

Sheikh recently plumbed the Moksha and Ladli portfolios to produce a series of 30 posters that were sent to hundreds of organizations throughout India. "It's kind of unsettling," he explained, "to make work in a place, then take it away and produce it in the First World."

Sheikh said his path to the work in India was the result of a logical progression. "My first projects were about my own heritage, so that meant work in Kenya and farther afield on the Afghan border, and then my father's country was from what was — before partition — India. Then I kind of grew interested in the notion of making a series of projects about women's issues with the hope that you could test whether or not a man could make something empowering of women, to reach across that divide."

Sheikh earned his bachelor's degree from Princeton University. Among his honors are a J. William Fulbright Foundation fellowship (1992), a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship (1994), and the International Henri Cartier-Bresson International Award and MacArthur Foundation fellowship (both 2005). His work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and the Art Institute
of Chicago.

In his presentation at the Santa Fe Art Institute, Sheikh undoubtedly will focus on one of the unique features of his approach: taking the time to get to know his subjects. "It's difficult to allow yourself enough time to let your preconceptions fade away and to come to some sort of deeper understanding of a place and a people, and that is somehow lacking at the moment — the notion that we really do need to spend time to chip away at preconceptions and allow what is really there to come to the fore," he said. "I've always found that it was necessary to come and go to a place many times before feeling comfortable saying anything about it.

"There's that kind of heroic notion of going in and — let's say it's Afghanistan — being brave enough to spend a few weeks or months there, but people forget that the people there live their whole lives in the place, and there's not really anything heroic about going in for a few weeks and bringing something back."

Sheikh's predilection for in-depth portrayals runs against the news-gathering convention of rushing in to relay a dramatic event but often missing important context material. "I'm extremely distrustful of the news in general, which often prizes the notion of conceiving of a story many miles away and going to a place and just executing it," Sheikh said. "Or, in the more recent past, actually manipulating a situation so as to move public opinion in a certain direction. That is very troubling, particularly with the places I've worked in the past, not always the most popular places, like Afghanistan or Somalia. I've seen how divisive the last decade has been, and I think the media, rather than trying to shore up those distances, is actually guilty of making them more pronounced, and that seems like a real shame, a lost opportunity."

Details
Lecture by photographer Fazal Sheikh, part of Santa Fe Art Institute's
Outsider: Tourism, Migration, and Exile series
6 p.m. Monday, Oct. 13
Tipton Hall, College of Santa Fe, 1600 St. Michael's Drive
$5, $2.50 students & seniors; 424-5050