All photos © Fazal Sheikh

Photo by Denver Art Museum

Fazal Sheikh: Thirst | Exposure | In Place is an exhibition created from three projects photographer Fazal Sheikh made on the Colorado Plateau from 2017 to early 2023. Sheikh’s portraits and landscapes shed light on the far-reaching consequences of extractive industry and climate change.

The exhibition presents Sheikh’s recent work in three interrelated sections: Thirst is a new series of aerial photographs that document the decline of the Great Salt Lake in northeast Utah, which is shrinking due to overconsumption and dwindling rain and snowfall. Exposure examines the impacts of uranium, coal, oil and natural-gas extraction on the American Southwest and on its Indigenous inhabitants. In Place evokes the enduring landscapes of the Bears Ears region in Utah, bringing Sheikh’s photographs together with contributions from scientists and Indigenous communities in and around Bears Ears in southeastern Utah.

Visitors will reflect upon the transformation—and often devastation—of these landscapes in the context of the past, present and future, while considering the juxtaposition of beauty and catastrophe, as well as intimate, human-scale stories and those spanning vast geological eras and changes.

This exhibition is on view from March 10, 2024, through October 20, 2024.

Read more in the New York Times: I Am Haunted by What I Have Seen at Great Salt Lake

Fazal Sheikh is an artist who works among displaced and marginalized communities around the world. His principal form is the portrait, although his projects also encompass personal narratives, found photographs, sound recordings, archival material, academic essays, and his own written texts.

He works from the conviction that a portrait is, as far as possible, an act of mutual engagement, and only through a long-term commitment to a place and to a community can a meaningful series of photographs be made. His overall aim is to contribute to a wider understanding of the lives of people within these groups, to respect them as individuals, and to counter the ignorance and prejudice that often attaches to them.

Each of his projects is collected and published and exhibited internationally in galleries and museums. In addition to his books, many of his projects are also available as free online editions (which are listed on this site). He works closely with human rights organizations and believes in disseminating his work in forms that can be distributed as widely as possible so that it can be of use to the communities themselves.

Sheikh was born in 1965 in New York City. His mother was American, his father Kenyan. His paternal grandfather, Sheikh Fazal Ilahi, after who he is named, travelled from his birthplace in northern India (now Pakistan) to Kenya and settled in Nairobi in 1912. Although Sheikh was educated in the United States, and studied at Princeton University, he spent summers with his father’s relatives in Nairobi, learning Swahili and experiencing a very different culture. It developed his respect for others’ traditions and an acute awareness of the social and economic inequalities that disenfranchised many communities around the world—considerations that would drive his work in the future. Fazal Sheikh is a PhotoAlliance 2002 lecturer.

Published by Steidl, The Erasure Trilogy explores the anguish caused by the loss of memory—by forgetting, amnesia or suppression—and the resulting human desire to preserve memory, all seen through the prism of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

This book series has been short-listed for the Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation Photobook Awards 2015.

The Erasure Trilogy by Fazal Sheikh
Published by Steidl, 2015
4 volumes housed in a slipcase, 438 pages, color, tri-tone images
ISBN 978-3-86930-805-0

THIRST: Great Salt Lake by Fazal Sheikh

Great Salt Lake is the first in a series of publications by Fazal Sheikh examining the effects of climate change and extraction in the western United States. It charts the destruction of the lake by industrialization and its pollution by chemical waste, the loss of natural wildlife habitats, the siphoning off of rivers that feed it, and the toll taken by rising temperatures and long periods of drought, all of which have brought the lake to crisis point. Sheikh reveals the condition of the lake in visceral images that, together with an essay by Terry Tempest Williams, present a record of Great Salt Lake at its lowest ebb.