Andrew Shi

On Tuesday evening, students, faculty and community members convened in Kresge Auditorium to hear artist Fazal Sheikh speak as part of the Kenneth V. Santagata Memorial lecture series.

As the  author of over 15 renowned books and monographs, Sheikh has devoted his career to photographing communities marginalized and displaced by political conflict, migration and climate change. His storytelling encompasses Mexicans arrested and detained by the United States Border Patrol, migrant workers in Brazil and women in Vrindavan, a sanctuary city for widows in northern India.

The photographs presented in Sheikh’s lecture, “The Image Before You,” aimed to contradict pervasive narratives about immigrants and refugees through intimate portraiture.

Sheikh opened his lecture by contemplating the role of the contemporary artist.

“Embolden and sustain ourselves through something that won’t be about bitterness, but rather about some form of healing,” Sheikh said. “For my endeavor, it’s the process of making, but it’s also about nurturing and participating in community.”

Sheikh explained that his ethic of compassion and human dignity emerged early in his childhood from summers spent in Nairobi with his father’s family. Following his graduation from Princeton University in 1987, Sheikh earned a Fulbright Fellowship and returned to Kenya, where over 500,000 refugees fleeing political violence in Sudan, Ethiopia and Somalia had gathered in camps near the eastern border.

Sheikh felt paralyzed when he arrived at a Sudanese refugee camp. While photojournalists immediately began taking pictures, Sheikh was reluctant to impose himself on the refugees. He approached them and asked for their permission to collaborate.

Sheikh showed a photograph of a pregnant woman standing with her two daughters. None of the three had ever been photographed before.

“Their configuration, the manner in which they present themselves to the camera, is completely theirs.

I stood back and received what they had offered,” Sheikh said. “When I looked at it months later, I thought, ‘Oh, that’s a beautiful image,’ but it wasn’t beautiful for anything that I had done. It had to do with the notion of vulnerability and … receptivity.”

Sheikh contrasted the familial solidarity encapsulated in his photo with conventional visuals of refugees. Standard images of malnourishment and suffering, Sheikh said, depict refugees as “victims of a cruel and violent world.”

“You never have the sense that there’s community there, that there is something that might offer them solace,” Sheikh said.

Confronting simplified narratives once again along the Somali border, Sheikh heard accounts from doctors of mothers smothering their starving children in feeding centers. His photos of children held by parents and siblings exemplified tenderness and care.

He learned through his documentation that in some instances, mothers had to make unthinkable decisions to spare their children prolonged suffering in the desert. By returning to the same camp years later and capturing the revived children from his earlier portraits anew, Sheikh restored humanity to stories once devoid of nuance.

Sheikh then traced his grandfather’s origins to the Pakistani-Afghan border. In remote villages, he was reminded of his mother’s recent death.

Sheikh recounted a dream in which his mother visited him, pairing this anecdote with a photograph of an elderly woman clutching a portrait of her missing son, a former mujahideen fighter. The woman’s dreams of a lost relative returning paralleled Sheikh’s feelings of absence, grief and longing.

In 2011, Sheikh was invited to Israel and Palestine alongside ten other artists. He researched hundreds of depopulated Palestinian villages whose residents had been displaced, with some relocating to Arab towns within Israel and the West Bank. Former residents asked him to revisit homes and sacred memory sites on their behalf.

Sheikh’s “Erasure Trilogy” involved diptychs of the two communities, dual portraits in which viewers could not easily distinguish which subjects were Israeli and which were Palestinian.

Reflecting on the conflict, Sheikh called the erasure of civilian suffering “the greatest scourge of our time,” arguing that honestly contending with human loss is a prerequisite for any reconciliation.

Sheikh concluded with his current series, “Exposure,” which captures environmental racism and extractive industries in the American Southwest. He discussed uranium mines and abandoned processing sites that left radioactive hazards exposed to wind and water erosion, endangering nearby Indigenous communities. Geohazard researchers and Native leaders, Sheikh added, have long warned of these dangers.

Nate Hagedorn ’27 attended the lecture and related his personal aspirations to Sheikh’s work.

“[Sheikh] has spent a lot of time in places where people’s homes are being taken from them and documenting their lives,” Hagedorn said. “It’s great to have this opportunity to learn from him, especially as someone who wants to pursue advocating for human rights.”