Collection Publications: Beloved Daughters: Photographs by Fazal Sheikh

Beloved Daughters: Photographs by Fazal Sheikh

Fazal Sheikh is an artist-activist who uses photography to create sustained portraits of communities around the world, addressing their beliefs and traditions as well as their political and economic problems. Beloved Daughter brings together work from his two most recent books, which examine the lives of women in India. Moksha (Heaven) concerns dispossessed widows who move to the holy city of Vrindavan to live out their lives in devotion to Krishna. For Ladli (Beloved Daughter), Sheikh worked with activist groups to explore the devastating effects of enduring prejudices against girls and women throughout Indian society. For years Sheikh has focused attention on the experiences of displaced people driven from their homelands by civil war, drought, and famine. In the mid-1990s, after photographing refugees from conflicts in Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, Mozambique, and Rwanda, he traveled to northern Pakistan to encounter Afghan communities exiled from their country by ongoing violence. More recent projects have taken him to Brazil, Cuba, and Mexico. In 2001 Sheikh launched the International Human Rights Series with the support of the Volkart Foundation, Winterthur, Switzerland. The arrangement allows him to distribute his work through unconventional means, including free online versions of his books as well as gallery and museum shows. Thousands of copies of the first two volumes in the series-- A Camel for the Son, on women in Somali refugee camps, and Ramadan Moon, about one Somali woman's bid for asylum in Holland-- were distributed free to government offices of both nations. In 2005, the year he published Moksha, Sheikh was awarded a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant and the Henri Cartier-Bresson International Award. In fulfillment of the terms of the latter prize, he completed Ladli for publication and exhibition in Paris in 2007. While installing Moksha and Ladli for their debut at the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation, he took time out to discuss the evolution of his work and the lessons of his time in India.

THE ROAD TO VRINDAVAN

A photograph portrays the spatial and temporal present: what is here, now. Its maker's motives define a longer time frame and wider ranges of emotion, social awareness, and historical inquiry. In the sequence of projects that have engaged him for close to two decades, Fazal Sheikh sees two forms of continuity braided together: a search through his own history and an exploration of evolving political circumstances around the world. Sheikh was born in Manhattan in 1965 and grew up there, but he spent his summers among aunts, uncles, and cousins in Kenya , where his father had been born and raised. "Kenya was the place that caught my imagination," he notes, "because it was my other half, the part of me I wasn't living." In 1912 Sheikh's grandfather and namesake had emigrated to Nairobi from what is today northern Pakistan. With a family background inseparable from the past century's history of cross-cultural migration and post colonial economic development, Sheikh has found it natural to combine his searches for personal and historical understanding. The two merge in a story Sheikh has often told about the beginnings of the photographic practice he follows to this day. In 1992 he traveled to Kenya on a Fulbright scholarship, intending to photograph in the coastal Swahili speaking community. But once there, he felt compelled to pursue what was clearly the nation's most pressing issue: a developing crisis on the northern border, where vast camps were swelling with refugees from the region's civil wars, including thousands of unaccompanied minors. Under United Nations auspices, Sheikh arranged to fly with a planeload of "hardcore media people" to what turned out to be a site he knew from childhood-- transformed, now, into a scene of human misery on an overwhelming scale. The news photographers plunged in, worked swiftly, and departed; Sheikh stayed on, paralyzed by a sense of intrusive irrelevance in the maze of shattered communities. When at last he decided to appeal to one of the Sudanese elders for permission to photograph, the bitter reply was: "Why are you asking me? I'm only a refugee." An agreement soon reached, Sheikh says, established the collaborative principle: "they would say what was most relevant to address, from their perspective‚—not the U.N.'s or my own preconceptions. This was a way I could begin to feel pretty comfortable. I was making very formal portraits, using almost exclusively a Polaroid negative/positive camera. In the afternoon they'd set up a makeshift studio and we'd have a session." Over the next two years he made the portraits of Somali, Ethiopian, Sudanese, Mozambican, and Rwandan refugees that went into his first book, A Sense of Common Ground (1996). Sheikh recounts one lesson: "That initial feeling of vulnerability or even of fear was really a strength; it means you can go somewhere not knowing how you'll make something. You're more open, maybe, to what the place has to offer. And I learned it was important for me to make a connection early on. To feel at ease in the midst of the community is my first priority‚—because when I begin to photograph, it puts me at a distance again." Successive journeys to northern Pakistan and overland to Kabul led to Sheikh's next book, The Victor Weeps: Afghanistan (1998). His camera subjects were members of Afghan communities who had been exiled by the Soviet occupation; now they were prevented from returning home by violence between he mujahedeen and the Taliban. Meanwhile, on a personal level, "I was looking for some ray of the religion I had learned about in relation to my grandfather, who died before I was born. He was a philanthropist who embraced what I guess to be the purest, the most generous essence of religion." Sheikh came to know the depth and dignity of faith among those he met, even as he saw them suffering "the results of religion getting used, co-opted, manipulated." In The Victor Weeps, the Afghans' two-decade history of exile is told through images and testimonials. Weaving through the whole is Sheikh's own narrative about coming to terms with the Islam he shared with them‚—if only as a common historical heritage. The book as a whole is neither "documentary" in any traditional sense nor merely confessional in scope; it is a reckoning of history's emotional weight upon the living. Asked about photographers whose lives and works inspired him, Sheikh names some masters of the formal portrait‚—Martín Chambi of Peru, Mali's Seydou Keïta‚—and such obsessive archive-builders as Eugene Atget, August Sander, and Lewis Hine. But he draws more telling parallel with an expatriate Swiss, Robert Frank. On the strength of the indelible rendering of the American scene in his book The Americans (1958), admirers and detractors alike first understood Frank as a documentarian, out to deliver a social and political critique. In succeeding decades, as he turned his camera away from the public realm and onto his private life, Frank came to be seen as an artist absorbed in memory, loss, and deep emotion‚—an interpretation gradually extended back to embrace the images in The Americans. The evident evolution of Sheikh's work travels in the opposite direction. As a student at Princeton, studying photography with Emmet Gowin and ceramics with Toshiko Takaezu, he completed a thesis project involving self-portraiture in the landscape. Of his college years, Sheikh remarks, "that's an age where you're chiefly concerned about your place in the world, your stance, your psychology. After getting through that, you're ready to begin turning your gaze outward." In 1987 he finished his studies; it was also the year of his mother's unexpected death, a sorrow that resonates through his work. A Sense of Common Ground is dedicated to her memory. It was Gowin, Sheikh notes, who saw that the Kenyan portraits "pointed in a direction I could follow, when I was still more interested in making other, painterly kinds of work. Since this way of working came so naturally to me, seemed so obvious, I couldn't see it as extraordinary. I'd always had the idea that if something was more complicated to make, it was going to be more evocative." At Princeton he had internalized the principle that "the important thing is the process: the mode of inquiry, pushing beyond what you know. And I still use that." Moksha, for example, had its modest beginning in 1998, when Sheikh read a brief article about Vrindavan in the New York Times. It was the first he had heard of the northern city where, for five centuries, widows have gone to secede from the social world that rejects them and adopt Krishna as father, lover, son. "Something like that‚—I don't really know what I can make out of it. But it's complicated enough to make me want to figure it out, engage the process." At the far end of the process, he adds, the discipline of creating a book turns each project into a puzzle again, casting its shortfalls and merits into relief. Working with Gowin also fortified Sheikh's feelings on an aesthetic point. In news and documentary photography, a certain roughness of technique is often taken as an index of urgency. This association is deeply rooted in our reading of pictures‚—the blur and grain of Robert Capa's D-Day exposures, for example, express his complete immersion in the battle unfolding around him‚—but as a formula, it has spawned many a photographic cliché. Sheikh's own inclination was "to handle the image with care. Some people would argue it's inappropriate to do that when you're dealing with a raw, unresolved, political issue‚—but I didn't ever understand that. I felt what Emmet would say: if you care about something, you have to render it in a way that shows that, and encourages people to want to know more. That sensibility really pushed me off in the direction I'm still following today." Sheikh proposes a "sympathetic contrast" between himself and Sebastiao Salgado, the Brazil-born chronicler of labor, migration, and economic upheaval in the age of globalism. "We've never met, though I've worked in some of the same places he has. I've seen the way he talks about his images, and I believe he's completely committed, that his heart is genuinely changing things." Still, the two differ entirely in method. Salgado works in the moment and brings majestic drama to the lives of the indigent, while Sheikh pulls time to a stop, collects his sitter's name and story, and where Salgado heroizes, he normalizes. "Salgado's pictures are able to garner a great deal of financial support for aid efforts," he acknowledges, "which mine probably are not." Sheikh hopes his own approach helps offset a hidden cost of images that invoke pity‚—which, he stresses, is a "hierarchical relationship. What pity doesn't do is let me understand that I could be in the same situation." When reading critical responses to his earliest work, Sheikh chafed to find himself granted "permission to look at Africa" by reviewers who inferred, from his parentage, "that the pictures were ‚—òby a Kenyan.' This without acknowledging that those in the book are very different people‚—linguistically, religiously, culturally. My counter to this was always that the greatest book of pictures about America was by a foreigner, Robert Frank! Maybe it's a wariness of exoticism, this idea that it's okay to look at Africa, or India, only when it's being brought to us by somebody ‚—òfrom' there. But that's a very divisive notion‚—a racist notion, in a way. I could be Kenyan, or Sudanese, and make pictures of my society that were very alienating or exploitative." The wide critical latitude granted an insider may be only the flipside of an admonition to others: tread lightly. Sheikh recalls exhibiting his work alongside that of a British photographer known for revealing his own family's dysfunction in explicit and rather brutal imagery‚—some of it "extremely off-putting and, you could even argue, exploiting his access. Yet so much was made of the fact that this was an insider's view‚—which instantly put those other issues in the back seat." A steady diet of spectacle, such as the daily news offers, can only numb and coarsen. But our capacity for responses subtler than shock and awe can still be engaged when, as in Sheikh's hands, the camera is put it in the service of a listener rather than a voyeur. By pairing his sitters' faces with their words, Sheikh puts us eye-to-eye and, so to speak, life-to-life with people unlikely to appear on the news except as anonymous products of circumstance. The effect recalls Lewis Hine's child labor documents, a landmark in photography's history as a tool of reform. Like Hine, Sheikh gives each of his subjects a form of attention that brings her within the viewer's moral reach. It was far from obvious to Hine's contemporaries that his photographs of preteen coal miners and cotton spinners would one day present the United States with more than a record of shame‚—could come to stand, in fact, for a soul the nation salvaged by daring to recognize the humanity of those it once deemed expendable. The world might come to owe Sheikh a comparable debt. Still, he registers impatience at "the notion that a photographer who goes and spends two months in a place where people spend their whole lives is doing something heroic, or changing the world. I used to say the pictures I was making were a clear visual response to claims I'd heard and images I'd seen in the media. I feel less determined about saying that now‚—but it is about broadening a vocabulary and creating a dialogue." Most of Sheikh's projects have focused on the corrosive effects of war on survivors and noncombatants. Moksha and Ladli, instead, confront everyday realities within a society ostensibly at peace. Their common subject is the lifelong, vicious cycle that bars so many of India's women from attaining education, economic independence, or confidence in the basic rights they have been granted, theoretically, by law. As revealed in the stories told in Ladli, longstanding inheritance and dowry customs make girls a drain on their families' resources, and thus prone to be married off in childhood. Once they become, in effect, indentured to their husbands' families, they stand to be blamed if they conceive females‚—of which some half a million are therefore selectively aborted each year. Female infanticide and "dowry death," or wife murder, routinely go unpunished. Yet as vulnerable as a wife is, her burden does not compare to a widow's. Even those widowed in childhood to elderly husbands take on a heavy stigma as the most inauspicious of creatures. In Vrindavan, widows center their lives around the teasing, playful boy-child and lover, Krishna, and yearn for moksha-- that is, final transcendence of the cycle of rebirth. Their lot represents a unique form of exile: a state of existence, as Sheikh describes it, "poised between this life and the next." For a viewer, what response could be adequate to the extremity‚—the abstraction, almost‚—of the traumas described in Moksha and Ladli? "I don't think they're so different form my other books," Sheikh quietly demurs. The widows of Vrindavan are not literally refugees‚—they lack even that social bond, having come one by one from around the nation and from all stations of life. But the life they make together, haunted by private memory and united by the comforts of group ritual, resembles a refugee community's life as he has found and revelaed it elsewhere. If Moksha is far from any narrow criticism of religion, neither does it shy from showing how "that which offers the women their solace has, of course, helped create their problem. The same thing, among Muslim refugees, came up in The Victor Weeps. You could take a Marxist line and rail at those belief systems, saying, here's what perpetuates this cycle‚—but I am much more inclined to accept religiosity as the solace it is." Ladli is not a portrait of a locale in the way Moksha is, though the greater part of the research for it occurred within the orbit of Delhi. "I would have felt wrong," Sheikh explains, "flying around the country with a wish-list" of atrocities. The tighter focus, in the end, makes a point: "You don't need to search far and wide to find these things; they're pervasive." As the NGOs and activist groups in Delhi, Ahmedabad, and the Punjab guided Sheikh in his work, they taught him in a larger sense, too. "As I said in a postscript, the hope is to be found in these people working in concerted ways in their communities. Most of the groups I worked with are run by women‚—strong, very progressive." He concedes that the abuses detailed in Ladli "are very unsettling, because you quickly learn that India has put the right laws in place, but the cultural norms are such that the practices continue in the face of the laws. The police and the judiciary are not determined to make people follow through. Maybe the point of all my work," he offers, "is that all the problems with no clear answers are the ones worth opening up."

--Joel Smith, [Former] Curator of Photography

Princeton University Art Museum