Sometimes first impressions can be deceiving. This is not to say, for instance, that a picture initially perceived as beautiful is not beautiful. It very well may be. But often, it is the unobservable story that underlies this beautiful picture that can simultaneously be devastating and transform the viewer's encounter with the image.
The premise that the narrative depth of photographs relies on much more than literally meets the eye forms the foundation for the Hood Museum of Art's new photography exhibition, "A Sense of Common Ground." This intimate exhibition presents contemporary photographs by New York photographer Fazal Sheikh, who focuses on the often-overlooked human narratives arising from the plight of African refugees.
Sheikh's black-and-white photographs gain particular poignancy by coupling aesthetic beauty with depictions of their persecuted subjects, whose lives have been steeped in an unimaginable and seemingly inescapable cycle of horror. In this way, "A Sense of Common Ground" presents necessarily complex portraits of African children, women and elderly refugees who have been forced to flee their homelands for fear of ethnic, religious, and cultural subjugation.
From civil upheaval in Ethiopia between related ethnic groups to genocide in Rwan-da, these conflicts have come to a head when one ethnic group has sought dominance and tried to eradicate another, often exacerbated by other nations' foreign policy.
"The result [of these conflicts] is that the men are killed and those that suffer the most in the long run are the children, women and elderly," show curator Barbara Thompson said. "It is the survivors who have to live on."
It is their stories that Sheikh hopes to tell through his photographs. Invested in using his portrait photography to raise awareness of these very human consequences of war, Sheikh spent three years in African refugee camps, documenting stories of death, torture and survival. These refugees had fled their native countries in the 1990s with the hope of evading persecution conflicts in countries such as Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia and Rwanda.
"The refugee camps were supposed to be safe zones, in a perfect world. It is not a perfect world, though. Somali women were being tortured and raped by the Kenyan guards who were hired to guard the refugee camps," Thompson said.
Thus, rather than finding the asylum they so desired, many of the refugees Sheikh photographs encounter only more violence, utterly unprotected and violated by the very governments they hoped would save them.
Whereas photojournalists tend to capture a moment of crisis as it unfolds, Sheikh instead turns his attention to the human aftermath of such crises. He challenges those more familiar, media-driven photographs that illustrate iconic scenes of mass migration or famine. Sheikh produces narrative portraits of the actual people who have been affected by the crises as opposed to the moments of crisis themselves.
Sheikh creates individualized portraits of his refugee subjects, seeing them not as mere faces among the nameless masses but consciously naming them. He allows them to tell their own stories both visually and textually, through the written testimonials he juxtaposes with the photographs themselves. Nor does he simply snap candid photographs of these refugees in the course of their daily routines, either. Sheikh allows his subjects to play an enormous role in deciding their own depictions.
Sheikh calls these pictures "collaboratives" because his subjects help him determine the setting and composition of the photographs.
As a result, Sheikh's portraits are deliberate in their imagery. The portraits are not only posed but also dictated by the subjects themselves and by the visual stories they want to tell.
At the same time, the story presented by the visual image alone may prove too limited in its narrative scope. For instance, a photograph of a Somali mother and her child may be pleasing on an aesthetic level, perhaps successfully eliciting even the most reserved viewer's emotions. In this way, Sheikh's photographs are able to tap into some universal sense of compassion and humanity that graphic images of war and combat often cannot.
"We distance ourselves from the horror of media images," Thompson said. With Sheikh's images, in contrast, viewers feels immediate association with the people they see.
Still, it is this initial impression that makes the written testimonials supplementing Sheikh's photographs all the more important. Sheikh has first removed the emotional distance between his view-er and his subjects by eliciting that "sense of common ground" alluded to in the exhibition's title.
He subsequently allows the textual narration beside each portrait to reveal the unseen tragedies in the subjects' lives, from which viewers might otherwise have withdrawn had they not already been engaged by the photograph upon their first encounter with it. In its elaborating on the portrait itself, the textual narrative re-informs the original viewing experience.
In appending these refugees' personal testimonials and historical narratives to the photographs, Sheikh reveals the brutal stories and life-altering decisions with which the subjects in the portraits have had to cope. Where a calm expression on a young mother's face once seemed peaceful, her testimonial rehashing the harsh realities of her persecution forces the viewer to see her anew. The viewer returns to the woman's face, re-encountering the photograph from a new perspective, sensing far greater pain in what had only moments before seemed like absolute serenity.
In providing these extremely personal stories, though, Sheikh reveals that it is the enduring sense of community that enables these refugees to survive. Even in those portraits that focus on a single individual, the subjects have chosen to include at least one other person with them in the visual frame, whether beside them or in the backdrop of the photograph. It is essential that these physically and emotionally tormented refugees include such symbols in their portraits, since it is their own communities and their shared histories that have allowed them to survive.
"Media photographs tend to show the helpless African who needs Western intervention. These portraits show strong survivors, not victims," Thompson said.
Although it was planned long before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, "A Sense of Common Ground" seems particularly timely given the concerns it raises about the unavoidable consequences of war. Sheikh's photographs quite literally put a human face on war and violence. He reminds his audience that the effects of any war -- justified or not -- linger long after the conflict itself has ended.
Sheikh creates portraits in the broadest sense of the word, extending them beyond the visual images themselves to the individual narratives they entail. It is the faces of the no-longer-nameless refugees within these portraits, though, that invite us to look beyond the observable surface of the images and know the stories behind them.
