BY ZACH MORTICE
Fazal Sheikh, Jada Maiwand, one month before Taliban conquest of the city, Kabul, Afghanistan, 1996, from the series The Victor Weeps. © Fazal Sheikh
There?s a searing, intimate quality to photographer Fazal Sheikh?s portraits, now on display at the Denver Art Museum. In a round-the-world survey of displacement, conflict, inequality, Sheikh?s posed portraits distill lifetimes (both short and long) of defiance and inhumanity into a single gaze. But their full immediacy doesn?t snap into place until you zoom out much further, to the scale of landscape photography, included as a vital counterpoint in the exhibit Common Ground: Photographs by Fazal Sheikh, 1989?2013, on view until November 12.
Organized by Eric Paddock, the curator of photography at the Denver Art Museum, the exhibit includes 171 images from East Africa, Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, the Netherlands, and more, split into eight sections divided by geography. These images take a 1:1 approach at connecting museum-goers to thorny and unfamiliar global conflicts (dowry violence in South Asia, refugee camps in Africa, etc.) through mostly black and white portraits of the people living them every day. Approximately 20 landscape photographs offer added layers of narrative to these intensely personal stories. Fazal Sheikh, Jada Maiwand, one month before Taliban conquest of the city, Kabul, Afghanistan, 1996, from the series The Victor Weeps. © Fazal Sheikh
Photos of a refugee camp in Kenya show acre up...