Gift of photos bears witness to the world’s most vulnerable communities

Sheikh reflects: “I have known Henry and Leigh since my undergraduate studies at Princeton University, when I was fortunate enough to find myself within their orbit, just as I was beginning to imagine the possibility of a life in the arts. The gift of Henry and Leigh’s attention helped nurture a sense of possibility and bolster my resolve. In the years that followed, as I collaborated with some of the most vulnerable communities in the world, their insights and counsel on the human and political context surrounding the work proved essential. As Henry and Leigh near the end of their tenure at the University, I simply wanted to leave a marker in honor of all that they have made possible in my life.”

Born in New York City in 1965 to an American mother and Kenyan father, Sheikh spent summers in Nairobi with his father’s family, learned Swahili, and developed an early awareness of the social and economic inequalities that would shape his work. After graduating from Princeton in 1987, he began making photographs in East African refugee camps, establishing an approach that has remained central to his practice: quiet, direct portraits that honor the full humanity of their subjects.

Sheikh has received numerous honors, including the International Center of Photography’s Young Photographer Infinity Award in 1994, the 1995 Leica Medal of Excellence, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a MacArthur Fellowship in 2005.

The gift to Northwestern includes works from “A Sense of Common Ground,” Sheikh’s landmark early project documenting refugee communities in Kenya, Malawi and Tanzania, including portraits made in Sudanese, Mozambican and Rwandan refugee camps. Each work is titled with the full name of the person pictured, a deliberate choice that resists the anonymizing language often applied to displaced people and affirms the dignity of each sitter. The gift also includes “Qurban Gul, holding a photograph of her son, Mula Awaz, Afghan refugee village, Khairabad, North Pakistan, 1998,” from “The Victor Weeps,” a project shaped in part by Sheikh’s own family history and his grandfather’s ties to what is now Pakistan.

Several works reflect a significant later development in Sheikh’s practice: aerial landscape photographs examining erasure, extraction and environmental harm. Two photographs from “Desert Bloom,” part of “The Erasure Trilogy,” consider displacement and settlement in the Negev desert. Two diptychs from “Independence | Nakba” pair Israeli and Palestinian sitters born in the same year, inviting viewers to consider history and the unequal structures of conflict through portraiture. Additional works document uranium waste in Utah, oil extraction in California’s Kern River Oil Field and ecological transformation at the Great Salt Lake in Utah.