Born to an American mother and a Kenyan father in New York City in 1965, Fazal Sheikh has been photographing displaced people for the past 25 years. But more than just taking their pictures, he’s been listening to their stories, getting to know them intimately, giving them a voice and putting names and faces to the displaced. The result is a body of work distinguished by deep-rooted themes of human rights and dignity.
Sheikh spent most of his childhood summers visiting Kenya, and after studying photography at Princeton University, he returned to that country on a Fulbright scholarship to live in a refugee camp for displaced people. Sheikh was disturbed by photojournalists who quickly moved through these camps on assignment, snapping quick photos, so he developed relationships with his subjects, allowing them to advocate for themselves and their communities on their own terms. He documented them in the way they wished to be portrayed, and included first-person narratives of their stories.
Common Ground, a new exhibit at the Portland Art Museum, features work from eight series by Sheikh, many of them shot in the homelands of his paternal ancestors—his Kenyan grandfather was born in present-day Pakistan. The first series, 1994’s A Sense of Common Ground, features gelatin silver prints taken in a Kenyan refugee camp. The titles of the pieces are the subjects’ names, complete with goosebump-inducing translations: Rwandan refugees the Lukelatabaru family (“One who was born to make war”), and newborn twins Nsabimana (“I beg something from God”) and Mukanzabonimpa (“God will grant me, but I don’t know when”).