India in black and white

Cool is the first word that Fazal Sheikh '87's exhibit, "Beloved Daughters," brings to mind. But it's inadequate to capture the profundity of his photography.

Fazal Sheikh grew up in New York City as the son of a Kenyan father and an American mother. In 1992, on a Fulbright Fellowship in the Arts, he traveled back to the birthplace of his father. With tens of thousands of refugees flooding into Kenya due to political instability in Ethiopia, Somalia and Sudan, Sheikh found himself with a wealth of subjects to photograph. His career as an artist and activist ignited. Following his journey to East Africa, Sheikh continued to pursue his goal of unveiling intercultural conflict within displaced communities throughout the world. He interviewed survivors of the Soviet occupation in Afghanistan, indigenous peoples of Pantanal and Brazil and immigrants infiltrating into the United States from Mexico.

The exhibit at the University Art Museum, on view through Jan. 6, focuses on the last two of Sheikh's five published volumes of photographs: "Moksha" (2005) and "Ladli" (2007). In the earlier book, the images and accompanying text illustrate the plight of India's dispossessed widows and their desire to reach Moksha, or heaven. In Vrindavan, a northern Indian city that is believed to be the gateway to Moksha, Sheikh absorbed the tragedies of the women's pasts. He came to realize "the full extent to which women in India are the victims of religious and cultural codes that reduce many of them to little more than childrearing servants," he explained in a lecture on Sept. 29. With that in mind, he ventured back to India to investigate the common prejudices facing these women. The result was "Ladli," or Beloved Daughter.

More than a hundred photographs from both volumes occupy two rooms within the museum. An inscription on one wall reads: "At first everything is dark, but then, after a long time, it is suddenly bright, like the rays of the sun." Six black-and-white photographs hang on its right. In the series of terrifying illustrations — a barren stone wall, a desolate alleyway, a toothless old woman — sunshine is nowhere to be found. Six more hazy, dark and timeless photographs follow. Though the texts highlight the Vrindavan widows' hopes for redemption from Krishna, the young god they encounter in their dreams, it's hard to believe their hope remains constant amid the bleak environment pictured. Many of the inscriptions, describing the widows' dreams of their lost families, echo Sheikh's photographs of dreamlike, surreal landscapes of caged animals, lone sitters and empty bottles.

Sheikh's naturally lit portraits of Vrindavan women project honesty and guilelessness. Their wrinkled faces, eyes devoid of definable expression, fill the frames of the black-and-white photographs. Below each portrait is a name; though each set of pursed lips, furrowed brows and clasped hands seem similar, Sheikh guarantees each woman her individual identity.

In the next room is "Sanjeeta" — a sleeping baby, her long eyelashes pressed upon her round cheeks. The image appears joyful until the text beside it reveals that in India, 500,000 unborn girls are aborted each year. The portraits within the second room document stories of prostitution, abandonment, child labor and rape. Like the Vrindavan women, the children of "Ladli" gaze directly ahead, allowing the viewer to see his or her reflection within their eyes. Unlike the widows of "Moksha," however, the adolescents of "Ladli" hold little hope for a bright future; they are expected to rear children and provide for their families. Through Skeikh's work, it is glaringly apparent that young girls within India carry unfathomable burdens.

"I don't really like photographing," Sheikh declared during his lecture on campus. He focuses on the process instead, he said. His disarming photographs result not from the desire to reduce an individual "to one horrific moment in their lives," but from the time he takes to deeply understand those he encounters, no matter how terrible their pasts, casting light into an otherwise unknown world.