Fazal Sheikh: Ramadan Moon

Ramadan Moon
Fazal Sheikh
Steidl, 2001
Hardcover, 61 pages, 31 tritone images
ISBN: 0-9707613-1-7
First edition

Ramadan Moon combines portraits, music, and texts to dwell upon the experiences of one woman, Seynab Azir Wardeere, who, after enduring intense trauma during the Somali civil war, attempts to celebrate Ramadan while under threat of eviction from an asylum–seekers’ center in the Netherlands.

Sheikh documents displaced communities and their experiences by collaborating with them over long periods in the creation of formal portraits and landscapes. By using his subjects’ names as titles, bearing witness to their traumatic experiences as well as their hopes, and disseminating his work as activist art rather than photojournalism, Sheikh challenges the anonymity and clichés of mass–media representations of refugees. The resulting photographs and texts are respectful, graceful meditations on human gazes, gestures, and beliefs. They assert the dignity of those pictured while broadening our vocabulary for understanding ongoing global conflicts. These three series, which span Sheikh’s career, were also in part initiated through his pursuit of his familial heritage in Kenya and Pakistan.