Article
Newsletter: Fall 2007
"It is one thing to photograph a group of people," Sheikh has commented, "it is another to try to understand them. For that you need time, and patience, and an innate respect for difference-- the gulf between your own religion, politics, economic status, language, and those of the person in front of you. Trying to bridge that gulf with a camera invites suspicion and misrepresentation. But at a time when traditional photo graphic coverage is often limited to a brief stopover and a search for sensational images, the need to take time and represent and understand the people whose lives and values are very different from our own is greater than ever."
Sheikh graduated from Princeton in 1987, and for nearly twenty years he has pursued a strikingly independent direction in photography, working among displaced people in East Africa, Asia, and the Americas. In 2001 he formalized his mission, conceiving of a series of book based projects that would put international human rights issues before a large audience; Moksha and Ladli are the most recent of these. But from the beginning, Sheikh's work has described a personal as well as a political trajectory. The first of his six major monographs to date, A Sense of Common Ground (1996), includes portraits he made in refugee camps on the northern border of Kenya, a desert region he knew well from childhood summers spent in the land where his father was raised. In The Victor Weeps: Afghanistan (1998) he traveled further back, to the homeland of his grandfather and namesake- and into the lives of people in another area torn by modern wars and migrations.
Wherever he goes and whatever the local issues he confronts, Sheikh seeks to engage and represent the humanity, dignity, and normality of individuals in dehumanizing circumstances. Quietly, firmly, he presents an alternative both to the heroic sensationalism of imagery in the news media and to a prevailing mode in artistic photography that accepts "otherness" and alienation as inherent conditions of camera portraiture.
Sheikh graduated from Princeton in 1987, and for nearly twenty years he has pursued a strikingly independent direction in photography, working among displaced people in East Africa, Asia, and the Americas. In 2001 he formalized his mission, conceiving of a series of book based projects that would put international human rights issues before a large audience; Moksha and Ladli are the most recent of these. But from the beginning, Sheikh's work has described a personal as well as a political trajectory. The first of his six major monographs to date, A Sense of Common Ground (1996), includes portraits he made in refugee camps on the northern border of Kenya, a desert region he knew well from childhood summers spent in the land where his father was raised. In The Victor Weeps: Afghanistan (1998) he traveled further back, to the homeland of his grandfather and namesake- and into the lives of people in another area torn by modern wars and migrations.
Wherever he goes and whatever the local issues he confronts, Sheikh seeks to engage and represent the humanity, dignity, and normality of individuals in dehumanizing circumstances. Quietly, firmly, he presents an alternative both to the heroic sensationalism of imagery in the news media and to a prevailing mode in artistic photography that accepts "otherness" and alienation as inherent conditions of camera portraiture.
