Fazal Sheikh Moves In Place At Yale Art Gallery

Even in italics, on a placard in an art museum, the voice of Peter, a Navajo miner, comes through loud and clear. ​“I worked in the uranium mines for more than 14 years, until the mid-1970s,” he says. ​“While the other men in our family were serving in the military, I needed to provide for the family by working; the mines were close to our homes, and we were told that we were helping to support our country.” There is already a sense of dread — a sense that turns out to be well founded.

Peter goes on to explain how the White mine manager directed them every morning to the part of the mine in which they’d be working. He explains being underground all day. ​“I was in charge of drilling and blasting new areas and always worked without protection,” he says. 

“At lunchtime, we dusted ourselves off and found a place to sit together on the ground, eating our sandwiches in the same space where we had been working. We used to collect the cool water running down the walls in cups to drink. We never thought twice about it, since no one had told us that it could be dangerous. Only much later, when people started dying, did we realize the uranium would have such a long-term impact on our lives as well as the lives of our families. Most of those men died from complications of exposure to uranium, and since we returned home at the end of each day with our clothes and shoes caked with the uranium dust from the mine, many of our family members did too.”

Peter’s story encapsulates the theme of ​“Fazal Sheikh: Exposures,” a moving exhibition at Yale University Art Gallery of the work of photographer Fazal Sheikh, organized by Judy Ditner, the Richard Benson Associate Curator of Photography and Digital Media, with Isabella Shey Robbins (Diné), Ph.D. candidate in History of Art and American Studies at Yale, and running through Jan. 8. By training his camera on the people and the landscape in two places — the American Southwest and the Negev Desert — Sheikh shows how cultural and environmental destruction can go heartbreakingly hand in hand.

Sheikh’s photographic style thrives on giving us the details. His landscapes portray the land in all the color it has to give, even if the subject in question is mostly an expanse of sand. We’re birds with sharp eyes flying over it all. In the case of the American Southwest photographs, this means we see things easily from the air that we might not be able to see so easily from the ground: the angular geometry of a capped uranium site, ponds of wastewater. When he takes pictures of people, he switches to black and white, but the high definition now lets us see the textures of their faces. In the context of the show, their eyes, looking into the camera, take on a weary, accusatory stance.

The placards throughout the show make it easy to understand why. As with his photographs, Sheikh’s documentation works in its level of detail. We learn about how various extractive industries on indigenous reservations — from oil and gas drilling to uranium mining — have affected the surrounding communities. Some, like Peter and his family, are put in harm’s way because of the jobs they do. Air pollution from the activities of extraction may be responsible for higher rates of cancer and birth defects. Radioactive material seeps into groundwater. 

In response, as Sheikh also documents, indigenous communities are lobbying to government and companies for some kind of remediation of the soil, a cessation of activities that keep harming the land and water. There is a deep and meaningful spiritual element to this, but Sheikh’s work clarifies that the indigenous communities’ connection to the land is also quite physical: if the water isn’t safe, if the land is toxic, the people can’t live there. In both landscapes and portraits, Sheikh’s work shows the wounds and the resilience around them. So much damage has been done. But there’s still a chance for restoration.

A similar sense of long, unresolved pain moves through Sheikh’s work in the Negev, which focuses on the people removed from land by Israeli forces, from 1948, when the State of Israel was founded, to the present day. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the most contentious in the world, with the rhetoric as fierce as the armed conflict has too often been. People who try to insert themselves into the conflict, even with the best intentions, often find themselves hopelessly entangled in its complex politics. 

Sheikh’s focus on the way depredations of land and people can work horrifically together lets him focus on the human toll the politics have extracted. The landscapes are often of places that used to have people in them — an Arab town, a Bedouin settlement — that no longer do. We learn that Israeli authorities have removed the names of some of these towns and settlements from current maps, or replaced by other names, as if to suggest that the previous inhabitants were never there. But as Sheikh’s photographs point out, physical evidence — a cemetery, a field of broken stones, the outline of an old building foundation — stubbornly insists on acknowledging the people who used to be there.

This acknowledgement is especially hard to avoid when many of the displaced people are still alive. We learn from interviews with refugees that some of the removal of people from land was terrifyingly forceful. Particularly harrowing accounts from 1948 find families fleeing from gunfire, many of them unsuccessfully. They describe, too, their attempts to return to their home towns years later, only to find their houses owned by Israeli families, who react to them with increasing hostility. As the documentation moves into the present day, it moves from photographs to video, showing how one particular Bedouin settlement has been built and razed over a hundred times, the people never really getting a foothold into the land, but never really leaving either. 

Sheikh’s documentation projects in the Negev — some done in collaboration with Israeli documentarians — don’t so much point fingers as simply ask us to look, to acknowledge the displaced people who experience the larger politics at play in deeply personal, immediate terms. They have lost their houses. They have lost family members. When they try to return, they are forced out again. The call for empathy, of course, has something to say about the politics of the Israeli-Palestinian situation, but it’s more subtle than the blunt-force way it’s usually described in U.S. media. Sheikh’s work isn’t about picking a side, deciding who is right. It’s about paying attention to who has been caught most in the friction of the conflict, who’s paying the highest cost for it, and by attending to that, maybe finding a better way to move forward.

“Fazal Sheikh: Exposures” runs at the Yale University Art Gallery, 1111 Chapel St., through Jan. 8. Visit the gallery’s website for hours and more details.