Fazal Sheikh (b. 1965, New York City) received a BA in visual arts/art history from Princeton University in 1987. To travel, and to observe carefully and with sympathy the people whose lands he travels through, has been Sheikh’s practice from the beginning. Most often his work has been with displaced people driven out of their homelands by civil wars, drought and famine, struggling to survive for years in refugee camps where the traditional balance of their lives has been entirely destroyed. He has worked in camps in Kenya, Malawi and Tanzania, where people fleeing conflicts in Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, Mozambique and Rwanda were gathered. In the mid-1990s he found Afghan refugees living in camps, who had fled after the Soviet invasion of their country. Since then he has worked in Mexico, Cuba, Brazil and, most recently India, where his latest book, Moksha, examines the lives of India’s dispossessed widows. Sheikh not only makes pictures, he interviews the people he photographs about their lives, transcripts of which appear in his books and exhibitions, to which he adds his own commentary on the people, their country, and the situation in which he finds them. In 2000, so that this work might be more freely available, he established the International Human Rights Series, which, in collaboration with international galleries, institutions and human rights organizations, uses publications, exhibitions and the Internet to reach a much wider audience. Since the 1990s Sheikh’s photographs have been the subject of exhibitions mounted in locations as widespread as Beirut and Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and hosted by institutions as diverse as Swiss churches and the United Nations. In the past decade there have been over 30 solo shows of his work, including those at the International Center of Photography, New York (1996); the Nederlands Foto Instituut, Rotterdam (1997); the Sprengel Museum, Hannover (1998); the Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland (1999); the Art Institute of Chicago (2000); the Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University, Evanston, Ill. (2002); the Davis Museum and Cultural Center at Wellesley College, Mass. (2003); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow; the United Nations General Assembly Visitors’ Lobby, New York (2004); and The Princeton University Art Museum (2007). Sheikh’s photographs of Grande Sertão Veredas National Park in Brazil were also featured in the traveling exhibition "In Response to Place: Photographs from The Nature Conservancy’s Last Great Places," which began a U.S. tour in 2001 at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. and has included a total of 12 venues as of November 2005. Sheikh has received multiple awards, including a Fulbright Fellowship in the Arts (1992); a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Photography (1994); the Leica Medal of Excellence (1995); the Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography (1995); the Mother Jones International Documentary Award (1995); the Ruttenberg and Furguson Awards from the Friends of Photography (1995); Photowork(s) in Progress III by the Mondriaan Foundation and the Nederlands Foto Instituut (1999); a Volkart Foundation Grant (2000); the Prix d’Arles (2003); the Henri Cartier-Bresson International Grand Prize (2005); and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (2005). His work belongs to over twenty international collections, such as the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the International Center of Photography, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the National Museum of Kenya, Nairobi; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Sprengel Museum, Hannover. Monographs of Sheikh’s work include A Sense of Common Ground (1996); The Victor Weeps (1998); A Camel for the Son (2001); Ramadan Moon (2001); Moksha (2005); Un Chameau Pour Le Fils (2005) and Ladli (2007). His work has also been featured in the recent publications In Response to Place: Photographs from the Nature Conservancy’s Last Great Places (2001) and Cuba On The Verge: An Island in Transition (2003). Thousands of Sheikh’s books and multimedia publications have been distributed free of charge to promote awareness of international human rights issues. Sheikh lives and works in Zurich, New York City, and Kenya. www.fazalsheikh.org Go back to top               Printable PDF version