Faisal Sheikh: Photographing Forgotten Communities

Detail from Fazal Sheikh’s book “A Sense of Uncommon Ground”

Faisal Sheikh was born to a Kenyan father and American mother. I discovered his work via an amazing book called “A Sense of Uncommon Ground” which I stumbled upon on a previous visit to Kenya (Text Book Center, natch). It is a compendium of portraits taken in Sudanese, Ethiopian and Somali refugee communities in the northeast of Kenya in the early to mid 1990’s. What seperates his work from what I like to call disaster porn taken in conflict areas around Africa is a certain stillness and peace of the subjects despite their dire situations indicating that Sheikh’s collaborates with his subjects on how they should be portrayed.
Sheikh discusses his work in an interview from 2003 at the “Cruel and Tender” show at the Tate Modern in London.