Teju Cole

Fazal Sheikh

For the past 25 years, Fazal Sheikh has highlighted the plight of displaced people and refugees around the world. He has photographed people driven from their homes by war as well as those upended by the redrawing of national borders and the reassertion of racial and ethnic divisions. Sheikh has also made sublime photographs of landscapes altered by political and environmental crises. In the past two years, the shift to the political right in the US has been replicated across Europe, the Middle East, Central and East Africa and Southeast Asia, as authoritarian governments and xenophobia have increased. As an act of refusal to these political trends, Sheikh sought out the celebrated novelist and critic Teju Cole for a collaboration that would reinforce their commitment to the ideal of a compassionate global community as well as the importance of individual courage. The resulting book represents the two authors' distinct visions, their shared values and mutual spirit of cooperation. With Cole's words and Sheikh's photos we are confronted with fundamental and newly necessary questions of coexistence: who is my neighbor? Who is kin to me? Who is a stranger? What does it mean to be human? Teju Cole (born 1975) is a Brooklyn-based novelist, essayist and photographer. His honors include the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Internationaler Literaturpreis and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Cole's photography book Blind Spot was shortlisted for the Paris Photo--Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards. He is the photography critic of the New York Times Magazine and Gore Vidal Professor of the Practice of Creative Writing at Harvard University. The photographs of Fazal Sheikh (born 1965) have been exhibited internationally from Tate Modern, London, to the Metropolitan Museum and United Nations Headquarters in New York and the Mapfre Foundation, Madrid. The author of 15 monographs, many published by Steidl, Sheikh is currently the Currie C. and Thomas A. Barron Visiting Professor in the Environment and the Humanities at Princeton University.

Human Archipelago

Eyal Weizman

The village of al-'Araqib has been destroyed and rebuilt more than 70 times in the ongoing "Battle over the Negev"--the Israeli state campaign to uproot the Palestinian Bedouins from the northern threshold of the desert. Unlike other frontiers fought over during the Palestine conflict, this one is not demarcated by fences and walls but by shifting climatic conditions. The threshold of the desert advances and recedes in response to colonization, cultivation, displacement, urbanization and, most recently, climate change. In his response to Sheikh's "Desert Bloom" series, Israeli intellectual and architect Eyal Weizman's essay incorporates historical aerial photographs, contemporary remote sensing data, state plans, court testimonies and 19th-century travelers' accounts, exploring the Negev's threshold as a "shoreline" along which climate change and political conflict are entangled.

Colonialism as Climate Change in the Negev Desert

Fazal Sheikh/Eyal Weizman: The Conflict Shoreline

Photographs from Kenya's Northern Frontier ; November 5-December 28, 1993

A Sense of Common Ground

Afghanistan has suffered from civil wars: first from the Mujahideen war againts the Russians, and then from the fights between the different factions within the country, which led to the current Taliban government. Photographer Fazal Sheikh, whose grandfather emigrated from this region to Kenya in the early days of this century, takes us into Afghanistan, where he has worked for the past years. His in-depth texts and sensitive portraits of the people reveal layer by layer a population that has kept its dignity and respect for life through almost two decades of violent struggle. Fazal Skeikh has gained the trust of his subjects, they have told him the stories of their family martyrs, and they trusted him so deeply that they even shared their often haunting dreams with him. Images of the women, of the elders gathered around the gaslight, of children anxiously looking into an unknown future, and of war victims maintaining their pride, create thoughtful insight. This volume in engaged with human rights and war as much as with photographic representation itself, and with the quest for what the people of Afghanistan really think and feel.

Afghanistan

The Victor Weeps

Cole Teju

Sheikh and Cole's acclaimed text-image vision of a compassionate global community, now redesigned with a new cover For the past 25 years Fazal Sheikh (born 1965) has highlighted the plight of displaced people and refugees around the world. He has photographed people driven from their homes by war as well as those upended by the redrawing of national borders and the reassertion of racial and ethnic divisions. Sheikh has also made sublime photographs of landscapes altered by political and environmental crises. In recent years, the shift to the political right in the US has been replicated across Europe, the Middle East, Central and East Africa and Southeast Asia, as authoritarian governments and xenophobia have increased. As an act of refusal of these political trends, Sheikh sought out the celebrated novelist and critic Teju Cole (born 1975) for a collaboration that would reinforce their commitment to the ideal of a compassionate global community as well as the importance of individual courage. The resulting book, now reprinted with a new cover, represents the two authors' distinct visions, their shared values and mutual spirit of cooperation. With Cole's words and Sheikh's photos we are confronted with fundamental and newly necessary questions of co-existence: Who is my neighbor? Who is kin to me? Who is a stranger? What does it mean to be human?

Fazal Sheikh

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