Spring Break
Lecture explores photography by artist Fazal Sheikh
Parini Shah
Issue date: 2/26/09 Section: Focus
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The essay was entitled, "Of Veils and Mourning: Fazal Sheikh's Widowed Images," where he read an epigraph while showing some of the images from Sheikh's photo essays. Professor Cadava is a professor of English at Princeton University. He is also the author of the influential "Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History" and "Emerson and the Climates of History," and has co-authored numerous other books.
Sheikh "is an artist-activist who uses photography to create a sustained portrait of different communities around the world, addressing their beliefs and traditions, as well as their political and economic problems," according to his Web site.
He has taken photos of refugees in Somalia, Afghanistan and Sudan, as well as Mexican immigrants in the United States. Photos from his book "Moksha," which explores and illustrates the dispossession of Indian widows, were displayed on a screen during Cadava's lecture.
Janki Shah, a 2nd-semester pre-pharmacy major, was " interested in seeing the pictures of the widows and the artist's reasoning and thought behind them."
Cadava began by saying that the photographs were a way of "pressing humanities onto human rights issues," and the "experience of the photograph is the experience of the eye."
He continued by explaining how the works of Sheikh in his book "Moksha," are paralleled to the journey of a widow. It begins with predominantly dark, blurred images to illustrate the journey of the widow through the "water of sorrows, crossing the shores of darkness to the light." In this sense the light was the Hindu god Krishna.
Cadava spoke a lot about the meaning and myths of Krishna since Vrindavan was his childhood home and his birthplace is located only 15 km away.
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