Art Objects -Jeanette Winterson
Austerlitz -W. G. Sebald
Dreaming and Scheming: Reflections on Writing and Politics -Hanif Kureishi
In considering books which might be appropriate for your endeavor, I was most interested in volumes I had recently read, or revisited, and which offered me a kind of solace and belief in the process of making art. In particular, the ruminations of Jeanette Winterson and Hanif Kureishi seem well-suited to students who may be considering a life making art. Although their chosen medium may differ, the way in which they confront the act of making and the importance that endeavor has in their lives is rendered with searing directness to the reader.
Austerlitz, and the broad endeavor of W. G. Sebald during the years of his life, offers the promise of how images can be woven together with text to create a new kind of language; a new sort of novel.
Biography
Fazal Sheikh was born in 1965 in New York City. He graduated from Princeton University with a B.A. in 1987 and since then has worked as a photographer documenting the lives of individuals in displaced communities across East Africa, in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Brazil, Cuba and India. He has received many awards for his work, including a Fulbright Fellowship (1992), a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1994), the Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography, New York (1995), the Leica Medal of Excellence (1995), Le Prix Dialogue de l’Humanité, Rencontres d’Arles (2003), the Henri Cartier-Bresson International Grand Prize (2005), and the Lucie Humanitarian Award (2009). In 2005 he was named a MacArthur Fellow.
Fazal Sheikh’s work has been exhibited in galleries and museums around the world, including Tate Modern, London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation, Paris, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow. His work is held by many public collections, including the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., the International Center of Photography and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, the Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland, and the San Francisco Museum of Art, California. He is represented by Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York City.
In 2001 he established a series of projects and books about international human rights issues that would be published and distributed free of charge and made available online. These are published under the imprint of the International Human Rights Series (IHRS).
His books include:
A Sense of Common Ground (Scalo, 1996)
The Victor Weeps (Scalo, 1998)
A Camel for the Son (IHRS, 2001)
Ramadan Moon (IHRS, 2001)
Moksha (IHRS and Steidl, 2005)
Un Chameau Pour Le Fils (Photo Poche Societé, Actes Sud, 2005)
Ladli (Steidl, 2007)
The Circle (Steidl, 2008)
Fazal Sheikh (Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid, 2009)
Portraits (Steidl, 2011)
Artist's Atheneum 