“Common Ground” fosters an illusive impression of intimacy between the viewer and the viewed.
The new exhibit at Portland Art Museum features more than 170 photographs, most of them portraits depicting victims of circumstance; people whose lives were forcefully reshaped through poverty, social banishment and war. But sitting on the other side of Fazal Sheikh’s camera, the exploited are granted a rare moment of power.
Sheikh photographs his subjects only as they wish to be portrayed, resulting in captivating portraits that exude a sense of dignity and calm that are often lacking in images of disenfranchised people.
For nearly 25 years, Sheikh has documented the occupants of refugee camps and other marginalized communities around the world, serving as a conduit through which they tell their stories.
“Common Ground” leads visitors through an elegantly displayed collection from eight series of photos taken primarily in East Africa, India and Pakistan between 1989 and 2013. The names and tales of displacement of those featured accompany many of the portraits.
The exhibit winds to its conclusion in an interactive educational room featuring a wide array of books, along with photos of Burmese refugees who have resettled in Portland. This space is a partnership between the museum and Portland Meet Portland, a nonprofit that works with newly arrived refugees. Visitors will have the opportunity to pose written questions that local refugees will later answer. The room also displays a map where refugees indicate areas they feel “safest” versus “least welcome” in Portland.
“It’s a wonderful way for people to feel a little more integrated into the exhibition,” said Julia Dolan, Portland Art Museum photography curator, during a sneak peek.
Sheikh, 52, was born and raised in Manhattan but spent summers growing up with his father’s family in Nairobi, Kenya. After graduating from Princeton University in 1987, he was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to travel through Europe and along the Eastern side of Africa to photograph. Shortly after apartheid ended in South Africa, he began to wrestle with displacement as he documented people who had been pushed outside of Johannesburg. Soon after, he headed north to Kenya to photograph refugees. He was bothered when he saw photojournalists come in and out of camps very quickly to take cliché photos of unnamed faces in distress.
“I didn’t feel comfortable beginning to work in the midst of a community when I didn’t really understand the magnitude of their exile,” Sheikh said. “For me, the most appropriate thing to do was to wait until a moment when they themselves would feel comfortable with the notion of collaborating with me.”
For this reason, he would spend long periods of time in the area around his subjects, getting to know community elders and gaining their permission before shooting collaborative photos within the camps.
In the years since, Sheikh’s work has continued to bring worldwide human rights issues to light through his documentary-based photography.
“Common Ground” will run through May 20. Sheikh visited the Portland Art Museum on March 11 to talk about the exhibit, as well as a new project he’s working on relating to the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante monuments and the impact of environmental racism on Native American communities in southern Utah.
As an extension of Sheikh’s exhibit, the museum held several events and programs in March aimed at elevating the voices of refugees and spreading cultural awareness.
Sheikh, who continues to divide his time among New York, Europe and Kenya, spoke with Street Roots from Switzerland in advance of his Portland visit.
Emily Green: In 2015, a photograph of a 3-year-old Syrian refugee boy whose corpse washed up on the Turkish coast raised worldwide awareness and empathy for the Syrian refugee crisis. Do you feel as though a portrait has the same potential for raising awareness as a photograph of violence or death?
Fazal Sheikh: I’ve never felt comfortable with the realm of photojournalism, with the idea of provocation. I understand, perhaps, in some instances, that those kinds of images may garner a degree of support for various issues, but I also am not really comfortable with the idea of trespass upon an individual. So if you think about communities that have largely been vilified, as have many of the refugee communities, or indeed in America as you would think of marginalized communities – people outcast, people homeless – that for me the most essential thing to do is to step back and to ask permission, to collaborate and to, in a way, be a conduit, the one through whom a voice or presentation can come to a viewer or a reader.
That’s the only way that I feel comfortable working. I’m not very comfortable with insinuating myself into a situation, and I very much know the moment when it’s appropriate to photograph and other moments when, at least for me personally, it’s not appropriate to make an image. I think all of us have to, somehow, begin to gauge for ourselves where that border lies. What are we thinking of our image making, what do we intend with it and when, on the human level, is it too much of a trespass to photograph or to trample another person’s dignity or privacy.
E.G.: For the series “Ether,” you explored the streets of Varanasi, a sacred city in India where people often go to die, and while there, you witnessed many people sleeping outdoors, covered in blankets. It’s similar to what we see here at Street Roots. We are located in a neighborhood where there are lots of homeless services, and every morning we see dozens of people sleeping on the sidewalks. It seems to me that these people have many things in common with your photography subjects. Often the victims of domestic violence and abuse, evicted from their homes in some way to try to survive in the elements. Do you see the same similarities, and have you ever thought about photographing people living in America’s homeless communities?
F.S.: I think that that project, “Ether,” is born of a wish to explore the nature of sleep, dream, birth and death. Varanasi itself is the city to which Hindus wish to travel, either on the verge of death or to be cremated after they pass away. So for me, there’s this mingling of the sense that I had of being with my own family members during their extended illnesses and as they passed away – of witnessing and being part of, in a way, their passings, and so to have as a subtext, this kind of invitation to the viewer to contemplate the fluency between life and death. In the Third World, and particular in India, death is very much part of life. For me, that was a big part of that piece.
Thinking about the notion of refugee work, I think there’s also this importance of gauging for oneself where a trespass lies and what is appropriate as a rendering. Is it OK to photograph another in the street? Is it something that one can do with a degree of reverence for them, even though they are in a public space? And I hope that work is about that. Though I’ve never considered that in the states, I think that would be a very interesting notion – the possibility of working with communities such as the homeless community in Portland, to think about the way in which we consider those groups and to try and create a body of work that counters or broadens our preconceptions.
It’s very much as we imagine the refugee communities, we’re freighted with these preconceptions about what those people’s lives are, and certainly, I imagine that must be the case as well in the homeless community in Portland. That somehow a connection on a very personal, intimate level may create a rendering that breaks down your preconceptions about what their lives mean. But I’ve not often seen representations or longer projects done with the homeless communities, but that’s sort of the kind of mode I can imagine it being compelling.
E.G.: The exhibit is titled “Common Ground,” and it would seem that people who are marginalized, displaced or fleeing conflict in different areas of the world must all have some things in common. In the years that you’ve been photographing these groups, have you noticed any changes in that common ground shared among those communities that you’ve been documenting?
F.S.: Well the kind of common thread through all of my work is this idea of myself as an American, born and raised in New York with family that comes from farther afield, from East Africa and from India. It was important to reconcile those different impulses within my very being; an ability to move fluently from one community to another and to insist that there is a kind of harmony across that divide. In essence, all of the work is about that.
Many of those projects are made in communities that are currently vilified by my government, and so I kind of bristle at that notion. I’m a little bit heartbroken by the sense that coming back to the city of my birth, with my name, Fazal Sheikh, soon after Sept. 11, and treated as though I was guilty by connection. I think that’s something a person like me has had to learn to live with as part of their reality in the last 15 years – this idea of certain groups being vilified, of certain communities being ostracized and a xenophobia about what having those people in our country might mean. It’s kind of based on fear. The same kind of fear with which we might imagine homeless communities or so this inability to remove oneself and to imagine oneself in the position of another.
I think that was true in the refugee communities in Africa for instance. It always was the notion that this was the gaze of another. It was only after Bosnia, when the refugee communities were fleeing and the fighting was coming to Europe that people started to realize, “Oh actually, I myself, given the wrong, unfortunate circumstances, could find myself in that same position.”
The subtext of the whole exhibition is a wish for the viewer, the reader, to be able to imagine themselves in the position of those whose lives they’re witnessing.
E.G.: At this exhibition, among all the many faces that you’ve photographed, are there any in particular whose memory stays with you, that you find your mind returning to from time to time?
F.S.: Oh absolutely. You know in some of the Somali camps for instance, I returned over the course of many years. When I was photographing in feeding centers, and then returning eight years later and finding those same children who had been infants being treated in the centers, and the women – there is one part of the exhibition called “A Camel for the Son,” and the title drawn, actually, from a letter that was given to me by Abshiro Aden Mohammed, the Somali women’s leader of a camp called Dagahaley, in the desert, who had lived for more than a decade in these camps. She writes very openly, forcefully, pointedly about the plight of women and children, not only within the camps, but in their own society back home. Imagining, what is real activism? How does one sustain a life in activism? When you witness people like that, and you are able to bring their voices forward, then you’ve really witnessed true activism.
Particularly now, when so many of us as artists, photographers, writers, have felt without any power in the current administration, where do you gain a kind of degree of solace? I realized that in a way, putting yourself back into the process and looking for those kinds of stories once again is the best that we can do. And so I’m frequently thinking back to those moments of meeting such women as Abshiro, or the woman whose story is the basis of “Ramadan Moon,” Seynab Azir Wardeere, another Somali woman who speaks very forcefully and bravely about what she has endured in her life, and laced within those various stories is a degree of strength and perseverance, which is something I actually admire. I’m not sure, if I were in the same circumstance, I would be able to muster as much strength and dignity as they have.
Email Senior Staff Reporter Emily Green at emily@streetroots.org. Follow her on Twitter @greenwrites.
IF YOU GO
What: “Common Ground” by Fazal Sheikh
Where: Portland Art Museum, 1219 SW Park Ave.
When: Through May 20
Cost: Visit portlandartmuseum.org for museum admission prices
Street Roots is an award-winning, nonprofit, weekly newspaper focusing on economic, environmental and social justice issues. Our newspaper is sold in Portland, Oregon, by people experiencing homelessness and/or extreme poverty as means of earning an income with dignity. Learn more about Street Roots