The visu­al­iza­tion of human migra­tion is con­nect­ed to doc­u­men­tary pho­tog­ra­phy and pho­to­jour­nal­ism in par­tic­u­lar ways. Move­ments of peo­ple from one place to anoth­er require what could be termed a trav­el­ling cam­era, able to track the wide­ly branch­ing net­work of human migra­to­ry routes, nodes, and abodes. In the con­tem­po­rary world of glob­al migra­tion (Mavrou­di & Nagel 2017; Papaster­giadis 2000), the con­di­tion of trav­el­ling pho­tog­ra­phy for pro­duc­tion of vis­i­bil­i­ty in migra­tion has been rein­forced. Tem­po­ral­ly and geo­graph­i­cal­ly exten­sive trav­els to sites all over the world have become an essen­tial pre­req­ui­site for doc­u­ment­ing the glob­al dimen­sions of human migra­tion and dis­place­ment via pho­tog­ra­phy. In the con­text of con­tem­po­rary pho­tog­ra­phy of migra­tion, its pow­er to this end is attest­ed to by long-term pho­to doc­u­men­ta­tion projects com­mit­ted to a form and ethos of visu­al doc­u­men­ta­tion that has been described as slow pho­to­jour­nal­ism.¹ Char­ac­ter­is­tic of this approach are longer pro­duc­tion times and long-form nar­ra­tives of in-depth sto­ry­telling.² This work method priv­i­leges the cre­ation of pub­lished out­put in forms such as the pho­to­book as an alter­na­tive, glob­al­iza­tion-crit­i­cal, and reflec­tive “slow-down medi­um” of jour­nal­is­tic photography.

The con­nec­tions among human migra­tion, com­mit­ment to long-term trav­el, and slow pho­to­jour­nal­ism are exem­pli­fied well by Sebastião Sal­ga­do, Jim Gold­berg, and Fazal Sheikh, who invest­ed lengthy phas­es of intense doc­u­men­ta­tion in the pro­duc­tion of their pho­to­books. To real­ize his glob­al-scale pho­to project “Migra­tions. Human­i­ty in Tran­si­tion,” Sal­ga­do trav­elled to 40 coun­tries, con­duct­ing pho­tog­ra­phy over a span of six years. The arrange­ment of his mate­r­i­al over such an extend­ed time and such vast geo­graph­i­cal dis­tances was facil­i­tat­ed by infra­struc­tur­al and oth­er sup­port from his own press agency, the Paris-based Ama­zonas Images.³ The con­crete results of his long-term pho­to doc­u­men­ta­tion project on glob­al migra­tions were pre­sent­ed in the form of two pho­to­books, Migra­tions: Human­i­ty in Tran­si­tion (2000) and The Chil­dren: Refugees and Migrants (2005). Jim Gold­berg, in turn, spent four years in work that led him to near­ly 20 coun­tries, from Rus­sia and the Mid­dle East to Asian and African coun­tries, to photodoc­u­ment the sto­ries of refugees and immi­grants who had arrived in Europe. This long-term project was chron­i­cled in a com­pendi­um of four pho­to­books under the title Open See (2009). Final­ly, pho­tog­ra­ph­er Fazal Sheikh has trav­elled wide­ly, to very dif­fer­ent regions of the world, among them con­flict zones, to work with peo­ple liv­ing in dis­placed and mar­gin­al­ized com­mu­ni­ties. His engage­ment in pho­to projects in Africa, Afghanistan, India, and Israel/Palestine is char­ac­ter­ized by longer-term com­mit­ment to each par­tic­u­lar place and/or com­mu­ni­ty. The pho­to­book plays a cen­tral role in his work: it serves as a medi­um for visu­al nar­ra­tion as well as a means of glob­al com­mu­ni­ca­tion and ori­en­ta­tion for audi­ences. In his view, this form rep­re­sents “the best pos­si­ble, the most com­pli­cat­ed, the most acces­si­ble, the most engag­ing way of work­ing because it doesn’t have the lim­i­ta­tions of some­thing like an exhi­bi­tion. An exhi­bi­tion has a restrict­ed num­ber of view­ers. Books are much longer last­ing. And for me, per­son­al­ly, books are a means of grow­ing. One informs the next” (qtd. in Jobey 2009, 31). His val­oriza­tion of the pho­to­book medi­um is expressed in the fact that, since gain­ing inter­na­tion­al acclaim, Sheikh has cre­at­ed his own pho­to­book series, the Inter­na­tion­al-Human-Rights Series (IHRS).⁴ In keep­ing with the char­ac­ter­is­tics ascribed to slow jour­nal­ism (Le Masuri­er 2015, 142), he val­ues accu­ra­cy, qual­i­ty, and reportage of con­text; seeks out untold, visu­al­ly undoc­u­ment­ed human sto­ries; relies on the pow­er of the nar­ra­tive (of slow sto­ry­telling); encour­ages co-pro­duc­tion, even with the peo­ple pho­tographed; and views the audi­ence, too, as col­lab­o­ra­tors. In addi­tion to edit­ing his own pho­to­books, he posi­tions his photodoc­u­men­tary work in the exhi­bi­tion field. By cross­ing the bor­der between pho­to­jour­nal­ism and (doc­u­men­tary) pho­to art, he rein­vents the prac­tice of pho­to doc­u­men­ta­tion in the era of glob­al media while cre­at­ing genre-migrat­ing images.

A clos­er look at the above-men­tioned photodoc­u­men­taries reveals that the pho­to por­trait rep­re­sents a cen­tral genre there­in, strong­ly cou­pled with the pho­to­book for­mat. Since por­traits have always been the focus of atten­tion in human­is­tic and human­i­tar­i­an pho­tog­ra­phy, it may be unsur­pris­ing that they are preva­lent in doc­u­men­tary images deal­ing with human migra­tion. Two major func­tions and mean­ings of the por­trait appear inter­wo­ven in the pho­to­book in con­struc­tive appli­ca­tion: 1) por­tray­al of human indi­vid­u­als (also in rela­tion to their groups and com­mu­ni­ties) and their per­son­al lives; and 2) por­tray­al of human, social, cul­tur­al, polit­i­cal, and eco­nom­ic life con­di­tions in a par­tic­u­lar place, time, and situation.

Con­sid­er­ing both per­spec­tives, this arti­cle explores the role of migrant pho­to por­trai­ture for life imag­ing by tak­ing Sheikh’s pho­to­books as its cen­tral mate­r­i­al. Visu­al sto­ry­telling is a core fea­ture of this social and human­i­tar­i­an photographer’s work, through which two main ques­tions can be addressed: how are real-life migra­tion expe­ri­ences as sur­vival sto­ries and per­son­al biogra­phies inscribed in the por­traits of refugees and migrants? Which form(at)s of por­traits are cho­sen, and which prac­tices of por­tray­al are employed for the pur­pose of doc­u­ment­ing migrant lives? Before delv­ing into the detailed analy­sis of Sheikh’s pho­to work, sub­stan­tive image-the­o­ret­i­cal con­sid­er­a­tions of the notion and mean­ing of migrant por­trai­ture are required.

1. ‘The other portrait’: Figuration in migrant portraiture

“Avec le por­trait – avec ces façons, ces manières, ces éclipses et ces ruines – se jout le sort de la fig­ure en général: de la représen­ta­tion, de la fic­tion, donc de la présence et de la vérité; du vis­age, de la présence et de l’absence. De l’autre, de sa prox­im­ité, de sa dis­tance. Dans le por­trait se retrace, se retire, se rejoue, très sen­si­ble­ment sous nos yeux la pos­si­bil­ité pour nous d’être présents” (Nan­cy 2014, 12).

This char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of the por­trait, offered by image philoso­pher Jean-Luc Nan­cy, fea­tures sev­er­al aspects that appear high­ly rel­e­vant for approach­ing migrant por­trai­ture as a pow­er of fig­u­ra­tion. Two seman­tic sens­es ety­mo­log­i­cal­ly inscribed in “portrait(ure)” play a piv­otal role in the photodoc­u­men­tary depic­tion of migrants and refugees. They seem to be in par­tial con­tra­dic­tion with each oth­er, although they are intrin­si­cal­ly con­nect­ed in form­ing a kind of pair­ing: draw­ing forth and with­draw­ing. The word “por­trait” is lin­guis­ti­cal­ly derived from the Latin word pro­trac­tio, a nom­i­nal­ized form of the verb por­tra­here, which means “drag­ging out.” It refers to extract­ing the essence, or a char­ac­ter­is­tic ele­ment, and mak­ing it a salient vis­i­ble fea­ture. The “oth­er” mean­ing of the por­trait is derived from the Ital­ian ritrat­to, a con­cept that entered gen­er­al use in Renais­sance times for tech­ni­cal ref­er­ence to a portrait/image. This came from the verb ritrarre, which sig­ni­fies “to represent”/“to depict” but also “to with­draw” and “to retract.” Pro­ceed­ing from this sec­ond ety­mo­log­i­cal mean­ing of the por­trait (ritrat­to), Nan­cy has built a com­plete por­trait the­o­ry of what he defines as “the oth­er por­trait,” l’Autre por­trait, in his sem­i­nal work of the same title (2014). He focus­es on the with­draw­al inher­ent to the por­trait as a form of visu­al­iza­tion. Accord­ing­ly, he defines the oth­er por­trait as a por­trait of “l’autre retiré, l’autre en tant qu’autre du même (ou du pro­pre, ou du soi) con­sid­éré dans en retrait – une retraite, un recul, voire une dis­pa­ra­tion” (2014, 13 f.).

Por­traits of flight and migra­tion medi­ate the two com­ple­men­tary mean­ings of the por­trait in their own dis­tinc­tive ways. They ven­ture into the field of pos­si­bil­i­ty of “being present” and being rep­re­sent­ed, of ren­der­ing vis­i­ble the lives of migrants, refugees, and dis­placed per­sons, who are with­drawn from vis­i­bil­i­ty as “oth­ers.” Por­traits of migra­tion and refugeeism are depic­tions of tran­si­tori­ness and fugac­i­ty, of the with­draw­al from life, of the absence of a dig­ni­fied human life. They are rep­re­sen­ta­tions of what Gior­gio Agam­ben in his book Homo Sac­er (1998, 71 ff.) has defined as the “bare life.” On one side, their imagery is on retreat, as they dis­play defig­u­ra­tion as a visu­al con­se­quence of the dis­in­te­gra­tion and degra­da­tion of life. In this regard, they are “oth­er por­traits” in the sense of Nancy’s altro ritrat­to. On the oth­er side of this “oth­er,” with­draw­ing por­trait, they are reveal­ing and pro­trud­ing por­traits in that they draw absence into pres­ence in search of poten­tial­i­ties and modal­i­ties of fig­u­ra­tion and representation.

Art his­to­ri­an and image philoso­pher Got­tfried Boehm has called atten­tion to the fact that ear­ly def­i­n­i­tions empha­sised the impor­tance of por­trai­ture as a process of fig­u­ra­tion rely­ing on depic­tion capa­bil­i­ties, before the por­trait gained form and qual­i­fi­ca­tion as an image genre of indi­vidu­um-bound human like­ness (1985, 45 ff.). This process-ori­ent­ed approach to por­trai­ture as an abil­i­ty to (re)present informs the fol­low­ing efforts to iden­ti­fy the strate­gies and con­cepts of migrant por­trai­ture employed by Sheikh for cap­tur­ing the mov­ing and tran­si­to­ry life expe­ri­ences and mem­o­ries of refugees and migrants. These are tools for de-oth­er­ing and dem­i­grantiz­ing the por­trait of the migrant as a stereo­typ­i­cal rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the oth­er expelled from states, cast out of soci­eties, and often also stripped of human rights.

For pur­pos­es of analy­sis, the cat­e­go­ry “migrant por­trai­ture” is artic­u­lat­ed as a com­mon denom­i­na­tor of two mean­ings: it refers to the pho­to­graph­ic por­trait image of migrants, encom­pass­ing that of refugees, exiles, and dis­placed per­sons,⁵ and to the por­trait of migra­tion as a depic­tion of the soci­etal phe­nom­e­non of human dis­place­ment. The lat­ter facet even allows for an under­stand­ing of migrant por­trai­ture as migra­to­ry por­trai­ture. Through this dou­ble cod­i­fi­ca­tion, it becomes pos­si­ble to inter­lace the rep­re­sen­ta­tion of per­sons (from indi­vid­u­als to groups) with por­tray­als of their liv­ing conditions—here, the migrant or refugee con­di­tion in spe­cif­ic (geo)political, social, and cul­tur­al cir­cum­stances of con­tem­po­rary his­to­ry. Fur­ther­more, in the notion of por­trai­ture, the rep­re­sen­ta­tion­al strate­gies of depic­tio and descrip­tio are joined in a unique way. This mesh­ing cre­ates a fruit­ful entry point for ana­lyz­ing photodoc­u­men­tary por­trai­tures as spe­cif­ic media and social con­fig­u­ra­tions of migra­tion (hi)stories.

2. Somebody to hold on to. Relational portraiture in Sheikh’s photobook A Sense of Common Ground

The con­tem­po­rary (post-)migrant con­di­tion of liv­ing in many places in the world (Feld­man 2015; Nail 2015; Moslund et al. 2015) is the core sub­ject of Sheikh’s photodoc­u­men­tary por­traits. Thus far, he has pub­lished five pho­to­books on the top­ic of dis­place­ment, refugeeism, and migra­tion:⁶ A Sense of Com­mon Ground (1996), offer­ing a por­trait of camps for African refugees in Kenya, Tan­za­nia, and Malawi; The Vic­tor Weeps (1998), a por­trait of Afghan men, women, and chil­dren who for two decades had been liv­ing in refugee vil­lages in north­ern Pak­istan on account of the wars in Afghanistan; A Camel for the Son (2001), a por­trait of Soma­li refugee women in north­east­ern Kenya; Ramadan Moon (2001), a one-per­son por­trait of Soma­li refugee Seynab Azir Wardeere, who was under threat of evic­tion from an asy­lum-seek­ers’ cen­tre in the Nether­lands; and Por­traits (2011), in effect a meta-pho­to­book on the motivic fig­ure and socio-cul­tur­al con­fig­u­ra­tion of the por­trait, com­posed from por­traits fea­tured in the oth­er four photobooks.

In his marked pho­to­graph­ic inter­est in the por­tray­al of dis­placed peo­ple, Sheikh has been dri­ven by his own biog­ra­phy. A sec­ond-gen­er­a­tion immi­grant to the Unit­ed States, he was born in 1965 as the child of a Kenyan man and Amer­i­can woman in New York City, where he grew to adult­hood. His family’s migrant path can be traced back to Pak­istan: his grand­fa­ther was born in (his­tor­i­cal) north­ern India before mov­ing with his fam­i­ly in 1912 to Kenya, at that time a British colony. In Nairo­bi, the grand­fa­ther became a wealthy landown­er and busi­ness­man. This fam­i­ly his­to­ry of migra­tion is an impor­tant anchor point for under­stand­ing Sheikh’s pho­to­graph­ic work, par­tic­u­lar­ly The Vic­tor Weeps, which, in por­tray­ing Afghan exiles in north­ern Pak­istan, was moti­vat­ed by the search for his fam­i­ly roots in Mus­lim cul­ture and soci­ety. Hav­ing spent con­sid­er­able time in Nairo­bi and being flu­ent in Swahili, Sheikh can be con­sid­ered a migrant between US and Kenyan soci­ety, between West­ern and African cul­tures. Echo­ing sen­ti­ments of many peo­ple with a bicul­tur­al back­ground, he once con­fessed to feel­ing like a for­eign­er in Africa on account of being per­ceived as an Amer­i­can (Jobey 2009, 17). Indeed, his por­traits express his long­ing for assim­i­la­tion with the peo­ple he pho­tographs, to be aligned with them. Sheikh is in con­stant search of the “oth­er” for find­ing and defin­ing his self, not in terms of iden­ti­ty but in how he is relat­ed to the world. For this rea­son, his por­traits of dis­placed peo­ple amount to self-dia­logue por­traits. The fact that he began with self-por­traits in his ear­ly pho­tog­ra­phy, when he was study­ing pho­tog­ra­phy and art his­to­ry at Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty, and moved on to “ven­ture out into com­mu­ni­ties” (Jobey 2009, 17) to cap­ture por­traits of the oth­er in extreme liv­ing con­di­tions affirms this inner por­trait con­nec­tion between intro­spec­tion and outrospection.

A Sense of Com­mon Ground (1996) was Sheikh’s first pho­to­book pub­li­ca­tion. In 1992 he had been award­ed a Ful­bright schol­ar­ship to pho­to­graph among the Swahili-speak­ing com­mu­ni­ties on the Kenyan coast. Upon his arrival in Nairo­bi, he was con­front­ed with the influx of half a mil­lion refugees flee­ing var­i­ous war zones in Sudan, Ethiopia, and Soma­lia. With the assis­tance of the Unit­ed Nations High Com­mis­sion­er for Refugees (UNHCR), Sheikh obtained autho­riza­tion to pho­to­graph with­in the refugee com­mu­ni­ties. He trav­elled between camps in Kenya, Malawi, and Tan­za­nia for three years, but the deci­sive vis­it would be his first trip to the Sudanese refugee camp in Loki­chog­gio, on Kenya’s north­west­ern bor­der with Sudan, in June 1992: it deter­mined his method of work­ing and how he would por­tray the refugees’ sit­u­a­tion in the camp. In the intro­duc­tion to A Sense of Com­mon Ground, he reports on how his fel­low pho­to­jour­nal­ists worked to catch the sto­ry quick­ly and keep to the parts of the camps indi­cat­ed by the UNHCR pub­lic offi­cers.⁷ Sheikh rec­og­nized the act of pho­tograph­ing as not a quick snap­shot but a long-term process of famil­iar­iza­tion, of devel­op­ing mutu­al inter­est, trust, and a sense of know­ing. First of all, it required per­mis­sion from the peo­ple, their con­sen­sus and col­lab­o­ra­tion. Only under social-rela­tions con­di­tions of mutu­al agree­ment and active par­tic­i­pa­tion could the pho­tog­ra­ph­er reach his goal: “to be aligned with the peo­ple” in the por­traits (qtd. in Jobey 2009, 17) in a kind of famil­ial bond.

The pho­to­book A Sense of Com­mon Ground is divid­ed into five chap­ters, each of which cov­ers a par­tic­u­lar refugee sit­u­a­tion in Kenya. The first one shows por­traits from the Sudanese tran­sit camp in Loki­chog­gio and the more per­ma­nent refugee set­tle­ment in Kaku­ma; the sec­ond is ded­i­cat­ed to the Ethiopi­an camp in Wal­da; the third is devot­ed to Soma­li refugees liv­ing in camps near Dadaab and Marafa; the fourth address­es cir­cum­stances at the Mozam­bi­can camps in Malawi; and the fifth con­sid­ers Rwan­dan camps in Tan­za­nia. The intro­duc­tion to each chap­ter pro­vides con­cise yet detailed back­ground infor­ma­tion on the par­tic­u­lar polit­i­cal, eth­nic, and/or reli­gious con­flicts that caused the refugees to leave their home coun­tries, among them the civ­il wars in Sudan and Mozam­bique, the trib­al fam­i­ly wars in Ethiopia, and the Rwan­dan geno­cide. Com­pa­ra­ble to a jour­nal­is­tic report, the intro­duc­to­ry por­tion of each chap­ter pro­vides, in addi­tion, con­crete sta­tis­tics relat­ed to the num­ber of refugees and a map clar­i­fy­ing the refugees’ routes and camp loca­tions. This form of pre­sen­ta­tion makes clear that the unique por­traits cap­tured in the var­i­ous places have not become gen­er­al­ized into a “com­pos­ite char­ac­ter” and there­by helps the read­er to remain ori­ent­ed. They are clear­ly locat­ed, polit­i­cal­ly sit­u­at­ed, and tex­tu­al­ly framed.

The image align­ment, page lay­out, and chap­ter-lev­el orga­ni­za­tion fol­low a sim­i­lar pat­tern across all five sets of refugee (hi)stories. Sequences of sin­gle, dou­ble, or triple por­trait images fill­ing entire pages of the book; series of nine pho­tographs on one page; and framed pho­tographs set against a white back­ground are inter­rupt­ed by fold­out folio spreads. In trip­tych for­mat, these bring out the vast­ness, infini­tude, and dead­li­ness of space—be it in panoram­ic pho­tographs of almost desert­ed land­scapes, of bur­ial grounds, or of large groups of refugees. Thanks to this image arrange­ment, por­traits of indi­vid­u­als, when unfold­ed to wide‑angle images, become posi­tioned in the larg­er envi­ron­ment of the refugee camp com­mu­ni­ty and the open, end­less space of nature.

A group por­trait of about two hun­dred unac­com­pa­nied minors⁸ (Fig. 1), cap­tured in the Loki­chog­gio camp short­ly before the chil­dren were to con­tin­ue their migra­tion south­ward to the next camp, is high­ly illus­tra­tive of this open embedding.

This presents a loose­ly gath­ered group of Sudanese child sol­diers turned refugees in the open bush land of the desert. They resem­ble a group pos­ing for a school pho­to­graph. By the for­mal adop­tion of this por­trait type, a social bond and com­mu­ni­tar­i­an sense are estab­lished among the fig­ures of the minors in this large and anony­mous crowd. Only one boy stands out in front of the rest, indi­vid­u­al­iz­ing the expe­ri­ence of the mass. His gesture—he presents his toy air­plane to the camera—could be read as an expres­sion of escape, or the lack of it.

Besides por­trait images, the pho­to­book con­tains per­son­al testimonials—namely hand­writ­ten let­ters in which refugees offer accounts of their sit­u­a­tion. The first let­ter, print­ed in the sec­ond chap­ter (p. 28), was for­mu­lat­ed by elders of the Borana peo­ple who had fled the civ­il war in Ethiopia. It describes the per­se­cu­tion of the Borana tribes by the rul­ing Tran­si­tion­al Gov­ern­ment of Ethiopia and also ongo­ing trib­al clash­es in the refugee camps in Kenya that had result­ed in the dis­ap­pear­ance and killing of Borana refugees. The final words of the let­ter are an appeal for inter­na­tion­al assis­tance: the elders beg for help, to pro­tect them and allow them to return to their homes in Ethiopia. In the sec­ond let­ter (p. 44 f.), a group of Soma­li elders liv­ing at the camp in Liboi protest against the deci­sion to close the camp and trans­fer them to two oth­er camps, fur­ther north, which direc­tion for them sig­ni­fied “the way of death.” These per­son­al tes­ti­mo­ni­al accounts, jux­ta­posed with a pho­to por­trait of their authors, illus­trate that the refugees’ lives are not safe even in the camps; they are exposed to per­se­cu­tion, vio­lence, sex­u­al abuse, and killing. In doing so, they artic­u­late the pow­er of Sheikh’s (photo-)documentary method of approach­ing and liv­ing with the peo­ple, espe­cial­ly the com­mu­ni­ties of elders, for direct­ly wit­ness­ing their life sto­ries and giv­ing visu­al and writ­ten form to these per­son­al tes­ti­mo­ni­als in his series of photographs.

With his refugee por­traits tak­en on site while liv­ing in the camps, Sheikh attempts to revise the stereo­typ­i­cal mass media rep­re­sen­ta­tion of African refugees. In his view, “the lives of those peo­ple are more com­plex than the way that they have been rep­re­sent­ed. Being an African or refugee is only one facet of who they are as human beings. I would like to bal­ance out the equa­tion, to broad­en and chal­lenge our pre­con­cep­tions as struc­tured by the media” (qtd. in Light 2010, 3).

What por­tray­al strate­gies does this pho­tog­ra­ph­er apply to broad­en the rep­re­sen­ta­tion­al scope of the pho­to doc­u­men­ta­tion of refugees? The over­ar­ch­ing objec­tive behind the visualiza­tion could be char­ac­terised as a por­tray­al prac­tice of derefu­giza­tion, a con­cept I intro­duce as one com­ple­men­tary to dem­i­granti­za­tion (Römhild 2015; Yildiz & Hill 2015). In Sheikh’s por­traits, the refugees are not reduced to their sta­tus and role as refugees. They are not pre­sent­ed as anony­mous human fig­ures but indi­vid­u­al­ly iden­ti­fied by name⁹ and by the camps where they live. Their agency is acknowl­edged also in that they are rep­re­sent­ed not as dis­placed per­sons, vic­tims of their past and present life cir­cum­stances, but as reori­ent­ing indi­vid­u­als who “have grown with their cir­cum­stances,” carv­ing out “who they are now, for bet­ter or worse. Not only for worse” (qtd. in Jobey 2009, 19). Almost with­out fail, Sheikh cap­tures the refugees in “bet­ter­ing” cir­cum­stances: in moments of friend­ship and love, as they are about to be repa­tri­at­ed, or in recov­ery. An exam­ple is shown in Fig­ure 2, which includes Athok Duom, recov­er­ing from malar­ia. The fig­ures are sel­dom sin­gled out (or zoomed in upon) with the effect of declar­ing them vic­tims or heroes; they are shown in togeth­er­ness, man­i­fest­ing human bonds.

The choice of dou­ble, triple, and group por­trait as the pre­dom­i­nant for­mats for por­tray­ing refugees empha­sizes the ele­ment of social human­i­ty that Sheikh val­ues high­ly. By using a sim­ple Polaroid cam­era that pro­duces both a pos­i­tive and a neg­a­tive, Sheikh embraces a slow pro­duc­tion process. His refugee por­traits can be described as for­mal but not for­mal­ized por­traits. They are char­ac­ter­ized by a sim­ple, direct, and respect­ful ren­der­ing of the person(s) being record­ed. One facet of the respect­ful­ness is expressed in the mid­dle dis­tance that the pho­tog­ra­ph­er takes (and retains) between his stand­point and the posi­tion of the pho­tographed subject(s). He is clear­ing the stage for the sub­jects to present them­selves to the cam­era while he with­draws to a posi­tion of receiv­ing, let­ting the pic­tures come to him. In A Sense of Com­mon Ground, one finds no close-ups and no affect images that put expres­sive faces on dis­play. Usu­al­ly, the sub­jects are rep­re­sent­ed as two-third or full-body fig­ures, with space around them indi­cat­ing the envi­ron­ment. There is not a sin­gle bust-like por­trait in these series. That would sig­nal close­ness and reduc­tion. His sub­jects are shown instead in their full cor­po­re­al pres­ence, and, most impor­tant­ly, they are posi­tioned in a way that high­lights their phys­i­cal loca­tion and per­son­al (bod­i­ly) integri­ty. They are com­fort­able and sta­ble on wood­en chairs or embank­ments, stand­ing solid­ly in a group, and—in a motif that per­me­ates the photobook—shown in front of trees or even sit­ting in them (as in the case of the pic­ture of Agai Miri­am Aden, an unac­com­pa­nied minor in the Kaku­ma camp). Spa­tial sit­u­at­ing, bod­i­ly ground­ing, and sym­bol­ic root­ing can be iden­ti­fied as major strate­gic fea­tures in Sheikh’s por­trait reper­toire. The com­bi­na­tion of uproot­ed­ness, fugi­tiv­i­ty, and tran­si­tori­ness of the refugee con­di­tion is coun­ter­act­ed by sta­bi­liz­ing place­ments. Here we encounter reroot­ing and repositioning.

The mytho­log­i­cal uproot­ed­ness of the baobab tree, which appears in many of the pho­tographs as a back­ground fig­ure or a trunk to lean on, becomes sym­bol­ic of the move­ment and ten­sion between dera­ci­na­tion and the new, firm root-tak­ing. One might, as Eduar­do Cada­va has argued in his arti­cle on Sheikh’s por­traits (2011, 14 ff.), under­stand the recur­ring motif of the tree in A Sense of Com­mon Ground as a tree of life, a branch­ing-out fig­ure of fam­i­ly genealo­gies, inher­i­tances, and lega­cies. The posi­tion­ing and reroot­ing of many refugee fig­ures in the lines and net­works of tree trunks can be inter­pret­ed as an act of inscrib­ing them in lines of ances­try and fam­i­ly his­to­ry, in par­al­lel with the repro­duc­tive life cycle of nature.

Anoth­er salient motif tied in with the famil­ial bonds is vis­i­ble in the close bod­i­ly con­tact that many refugees in the images main­tain. In a lit­er­al sense, these por­traits are touch­ing images, pre­sent­ing in numer­ous ways and con­fig­u­ra­tions the touch of hands in deeply reach­ing ges­tures of belong­ing and togeth­er­ness, trust, com­fort, and pro­tec­tion. Hands might be placed on the chest as self-touch­ing, self-hold­ing, and self-pro­tec­tion; they might rest on shoul­ders or heads; they may equal­ly sup­port heads or hold oth­er hands, those of loved ones; or they might hold objects (sticks, toys, etc.) or images, whether holy images or por­traits of fam­i­ly mem­bers who are deceased or oth­er­wise beyond the reach of those hands. The pho­tographs with the touch of hands reach out to rep­re­sent the inti­mate social rela­tions and fam­i­ly bonds upheld in the refugee com­mu­ni­ties. Tak­en togeth­er, they express the attempt to hold on to phys­i­cal, social, and emo­tion­al life but also artic­u­late efforts “to car­ry and hand over, to hand down, like a kind of lega­cy or inher­i­tance, a frag­ment of the past” (Cada­va 2011, 21).

In some por­traits, the touch­ing hands express the dif­fi­cul­ty and bur­den involved in “hold­ing on.” For exam­ple, in the por­trait of Nya­pa Deng and her daugh­ter in Loki­chog­gio, the male hand upon the bare head of the child has the weight of a bur­den. It is ambigu­ous in that its ges­ture is pro­tec­tive yet at the same time vio­lent also, with a firm grip on the head as if pulling it away. This impres­sion is inten­si­fied by the photo’s com­po­si­tion. The male fig­ure is cut off by the frame—only this hand and a slight con­tour line of the man’s body remain. The sev­er­ing of fam­i­ly bonds and the vio­lence of sep­a­ra­tion caused by flight and migra­tion are haunt­ing­ly cap­tured in this double/triple por­trait. A sim­i­lar com­po­si­tion, again with the cropped-out and face­less fig­ure of the father, is found in the por­trait of Hadi­ja (Fig. 3).

Sheikh’s detailed cap­tion informs the view­er that this eight-year-old girl, Hadi­ja, remained silent ever since she was sep­a­rat­ed from her moth­er while cross­ing the bor­der from Soma­lia to Kenya. Here, the father’s hand speaks of ten­der bond­ing and strong pro­tec­tion as the man reach­es out from behind his daugh­ter to rest it on her shoul­der, to hold (on to) her. The expres­sive face of Hadi­ja forms a stark con­trast to the child’s mute­ness. It is the still­ness of pho­tog­ra­phy that enables the mute­ness to speak vivid­ly. The bor­der at the top of the image cuts direct­ly through the mouth line of the father fig­ure, under­scor­ing the reliance on bod­i­ly ges­tures’ com­mu­ni­ca­tion. Accord­ing to Cada­va, this touch­ing por­trait of Hadi­ja reflects how, in the words of Judith But­ler, the pre­car­i­ous­ness of life can be grasped: “One would need to hear the face as it speaks in some­thing oth­er than lan­guage to know the pre­car­i­ous­ness of life that is at stake (…). We would have to inter­ro­gate the emer­gence and van­ish­ing of the human at the lim­its of what we can know, what we can hear, what we can see, what we can sense” (But­ler qtd. in Cada­va 2011, 6).

3. Collaborative photography and the construction of the communal portrait: Sheikh’s The Victor Weeps

Sheikh’s photodoc­u­men­tary The Vic­tor Weeps can be viewed as a semi-auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal book, for it cou­ples the search for his own migrant fam­i­ly his­to­ry, par­tic­u­lar­ly that of his grand­fa­ther, with fam­i­ly sto­ries of Afghan refugees in north­ern Pak­istan. Here, the photographer’s per­son­al inter­est in fam­i­ly life sto­ries becomes evi­dent as the main moti­va­tion for his photodoc­u­men­tary sto­ry­telling. Per­son­al encoun­ters with the refugees for an exchange of indi­vid­ual accounts demar­cate the begin­ning of the pho­to-por­tray­ing pro­ce­dure, with Sheikh first ask­ing “the mem­bers of the com­mu­ni­ty for their will­ing­ness to col­lab­o­rate in the doc­u­men­ta­tion” (Light 2010, 2). He com­ment­ed thus on his way of work­ing: “In my recent work among the Afghan vil­lages of exile, the elder’s agree­ment to work with me, to pro­vide insight, as well as pro­tec­tion, has been cru­cial” (ibid.). With this col­lab­o­ra­tive com­mu­ni­ty approach as a giv­en, “[t]he act of pho­tograph­ing becomes an event in the vil­lage. We con­struct the image togeth­er. Many of the peo­ple have nev­er been pho­tographed before, and the Polaroid pro­vides a point of ref­er­ence for dis­cus­sions that fol­low in which the res­i­dents of the com­mu­ni­ty offer their opin­ions on how the doc­u­men­ta­tion may unfold” (Light 2010, 2).

In the tes­ti­mo­ni­als and evi­dence pro­vid­ed, the doc­u­men­ta­tion in the pho­to­book is rich and quite var­ied. It oper­ates on the basis of close inter­weav­ing between pho­tog­ra­phy and text. Afghan children’s draw­ings serve as a pref­ace, open­ing the pho­to­book. They are fol­lowed by panoram­ic pho­tographs of ruined cityscapes from the Afghan cap­i­tal, Kab­ul, cap­tured a month pri­or to the Taliban’s cap­ture of the city. Turn­ing the pages that dis­play these images of the rav­ages of war, one finds them jux­ta­posed with Afghan poems com­ment­ing on the dev­as­ta­tion, on the loss of faith and life. After this unflinch­ing por­tray­al of the rea­sons for flee­ing Afghanistan, there is a per­son­al account by author-pho­tog­ra­ph­er Sheikh. Under the title “The Land of Afghans,” he reports on his mov­ing encounter with senior mem­bers of the Mus­lim com­mu­ni­ty in the refugee vil­lage of Bizen Khel. This text pre­ludes a sequence of por­traits of male elders, most of whom had been Mujahideen fight­ers. The set of por­traits con­sti­tutes the first part of the pho­to­book. They are accom­pa­nied by per­son­al bio­graph­i­cal accounts and a let­ter from the elder­ly peo­ple in the images but also by poems and poet­ic com­ments. The let­ter, between two of the pho­to por­traits, was writ­ten by for­mer elders and com­man­ders of the Agra Dis­trict, in Afghanistan’s Log­ar Province. In it, they describe their deci­sion for the tribe known as Ahmed Zai to migrate to Pak­istan in con­se­quence of the Sovi­et-Afghan war and there seek inter­na­tion­al sup­port to enable a return to their home vil­lages. The sec­ond part of the pho­to­book fol­lows the same image-and-text com­po­si­tion. Ded­i­cat­ed to por­traits of elder­ly women and chil­dren, it holds a mir­ror to the social hier­ar­chies and gen­der divi­sions in Mus­lim com­mu­ni­ties. Where­as the bio­graph­i­cal por­traits ear­li­er in the book high­light the his­tor­i­cal hard facts of the Afghan war and the seizure of pow­er by the Tal­iban through the lens of fam­i­ly his­to­ry, the sec­ond part explores per­son­al war mem­o­ries and future-focused imag­i­na­tion through “dream sto­ries.” Final­ly, the third part of the book fol­lows the route of the Afghan refugee exo­dus in reverse, there­by empha­sis­ing per­son­al and com­mu­nal sto­ry­telling of rem­i­gra­tion and return. It shows por­traits of peo­ple liv­ing along the migra­tion pas­sage between the trib­al regions of north­west­ern Pak­istan and the Afghan cap­i­tal. In the man­ner of an insert frame, this sec­tion sets forth por­traits by Jalal­abad-based stu­dio pho­tog­ra­ph­er Ridzwan­ul Haq (see Fig. 4), there­by form­ing both a hybrid and a con­trast between Sheikh’s own pho­to por­traits and those by the Afghan por­trait photographer.

Faced with the rul­ing Tal­iban regime’s pro­hi­bi­tion of fig­u­ra­tive images, the stu­dio pho­tog­ra­ph­er had decid­ed to offer his por­traits to Fazal Sheikh. In con­se­quence, the stu­dio por­traits become trav­el­ling pho­tographs them­selves, migrat­ing to the pages of the pho­to­book for a place of refuge, medi­um of pro­tec­tion, and source of remembrance.

The larg­er por­trait of Afghan exiles liv­ing in north­ern Pak­istan is con­struct­ed by a com­plex sequence and inter­re­la­tion­al lay­er­ing of dif­fer­ent mate­r­i­al forms and media gen­res of por­trai­ture, among them Sheikh’s own por­trait pho­tographs of men, women, and chil­dren in the com­mu­ni­ty; por­trait pho­tographs of deceased rel­a­tives that com­mu­ni­ty mem­bers brought to him to be pho­tographed; found-footage stu­dio por­traits; and auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal tex­tu­al por­traits of both the author-pho­tog­ra­ph­er and the refugees por­trayed. “I was weav­ing togeth­er some­thing much more com­pli­cat­ed, not just because of the found pic­tures, or the tes­ti­mo­ni­als, but also because of my own rela­tion­ship to the place,” explained Sheikh (qtd. in Jobey 2009, 21) in describ­ing his por­tray­al strat­e­gy. With this state­ment he stress­es the role of the pho­to­book as (semi-over­laid or ful­ly over­laid) auto-doc­u­men­tary to con­nect his own life sto­ry of return­ing to the land of his fore­fa­thers with the life sto­ries of Afghan refugees in Pakistan.

The por­traits of the community’s male elders as pre­sent­ed in the first part of the pho­to­book are very respect­ful, even though most of them use close-up images. The elders are shown in their tra­di­tion­al cloth­ing as Afghan peo­ple and part­ly also as Mujahideen, with a tur­ban, an Afghan pakol, or a Peshawari topi on the head, and a long beard. The focus of these pho­tographs is on the head and face, appear­ing out of com­plete dark­ness in an almost mag­i­cal light(en)ing of strong con­trasts, be it in pro­file, three-quar­ters, or frontal por­trait for­mat. The spot­light of the cam­era is direct­ed at the fur­rowed faces of the elders marked by their life expe­ri­ences as fight­ers, vic­tims of war, and refugees, as fathers and com­mu­ni­ty lead­ers. Usu­al­ly, the gaze of the per­son por­trayed is direct­ed away from meet­ing with the cam­era (Fig. 5). It is with­drawn from the view­er, in being direct­ed downward/sideways or being hid­den by closed or half-lid­ded eyes or by hands held in front of the face in a rather pro­tec­tive gesture.

When the gaze is ori­ent­ed toward the view­er head-on, there is no sug­ges­tion of direct eye con­tact and per­son­al address. Instead, the view­er reads reclu­sive­ness, intro­spec­tion, and even empti­ness due to the shad­ow­ing and blur­ring of focus at the eyes. Often, the front-on views are pre­sent­ed from slight­ly below. This per­spec­tive con­veys a sense of dis­tance despite the extreme close­ness to the per­son. Most, though not all, of the por­trait images are accom­pa­nied by a piece of text, such as an auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal account, a poem, or a prose state­ment by an Afghan poet or his­to­ri­an iden­ti­fied by the image sub­ject as an expres­sion of his view on life and the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion of Afghan peo­ple. This text is direct­ly con­nect­ed with the image in the lay­out, too—they are on the same spread of pages. This par­al­lel tex­t‑with-image arrange­ment empha­sizes that the por­trait images can be ful­ly com­pre­hend­ed only in light of the subject’s auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal account or cho­sen excerpt. Rohul­lah, for exam­ple (shown in Fig. 6), tells the read­er about the death of his cousin Qari Monir in 1981.

In his per­son­al sto­ry, he gives an account of how his cousin, togeth­er with oth­er elders and mul­lahs, dis­ap­peared in the desert, hav­ing been tak­en there by com­mu­nist troops, with a shep­herd lat­er find­ing the bod­ies of the 14 miss­ing lead­ers, Qari Monir among them. They had been buried alive. He cites this inci­dent as what con­vinced him that the com­mu­nists “were will­ing to kill us all, not just those who were fight­ers […] so we decid­ed to leave the vil­lage and take our fam­i­lies to the safe­ty of Pak­istan” (Monir qtd. in Sheikh 1998, 61).

In some cas­es, the pho­to­graph­ic por­trait is pre­sent­ed as a stand­alone image fill­ing one side of the two-page lay­out while the oth­er page is left blank, with­out any tex­tu­al com­ment. This com­po­si­tion gives voice to silence, to a person’s speech­less­ness in the face of the dra­mat­ic, trau­ma-pro­duc­ing events of war, flight, and exile. Mute­ness is made vis­i­ble. Here, sto­ry­telling, based on per­son­al encoun­ters between the pho­tog­ra­ph­er and the pho­tographed, also allows for voic­ing per­son­al his­to­ries and biogra­phies of suf­fer­ing that can­not be read­i­ly deduced from sin­gle pho­to-por­trait images alone. In the case of the woman’s image in Fig­ure 7, one might not even be able to state with cer­tain­ty that this pho­to­graph of the per­son iden­ti­fied as Rohgul qual­i­fies as a por­trait pho­to­graph, since the face, the mark­er of a person’s iden­ti­ty as an indi­vid­ual, is hid­den behind the lat­ticed screen of the burqa.

The objects shown that sur­round the rep­re­sent­ed figure—the crutch and the rotat­ed shoe lying on the ground—can be tak­en as signs for imag­in­ing what might have hap­pened to Rohgul, as refer­ring to a hand­i­capped per­son who near­ly lost her life; yet the clas­si­cal por­trait of an indi­vidu­um, her char­ac­ter, sta­tus, and expres­sion, is with­drawn in this pho­to­graph. This is stressed by the closed ges­ture of the woman, gath­er­ing up the burqa drap­ing in front of her body (while, in so doing, she reveals parts of her feet and legs). From her first-per­son account, we learn that she had been mar­ried to a police offi­cer and enjoyed a good life in Afghanistan until, in 1989, her hus­band was shot on his way home by one of the Mujahideen fac­tions. Her neigh­bour­hood became the front line between war­ring Mujahideen forces, and the fight­ing left her youngest son, Fawad, dead and Rohgul her­self seri­ous­ly wound­ed. Although doc­tors at the hos­pi­tal advised her to have her leg ampu­tat­ed, she refused and ulti­mate­ly man­aged to keep it. In the end, she fled to south­ern Pak­istan to live with her cousin. The final pas­sage of her per­son­al account express­es her hope of return­ing to the land of her birth “when the gov­ern­ment gives its peo­ple jobs rather than Kalash­nikovs” (Roghul qtd. in Sheikh 1998, 140). Only when the pho­to and text are read in com­bi­na­tion, when the visu­al depic­tion and tex­tu­al descrip­tion are con­sid­ered joint­ly to bring visu­al and oral sto­ry­telling togeth­er, does the image of Rohgul turn into an individual(ized) por­trait of the per­son as well as a personal(ized) bio-image of Afghan war his­to­ry. The text-image approach to life doc­u­men­ta­tion is a clear­ly defined method in Sheikh’s pho­to­graph­ic work. “It seemed to me almost impos­si­ble to sev­er one from the other—and whol­ly inap­pro­pri­ate,” he stat­ed in con­ver­sa­tion with Liz Jobey, con­tin­u­ing: “I came to believe that the pho­tographs did some­thing very well, but work­ing with the issues I was engaged with, I found it impor­tant to flesh out what the pho­tographs didn’t do. They were not get­ting to the depths of what I need­ed, so I used the people’s voic­es” (2009, 21).

Pre­cise­ly for voic­ing their life sto­ries, the Afghan refugees pho­tographed by Sheikh often brought their own por­trait pho­tographs into the con­ver­sa­tions, among them snap­shots of dead rel­a­tives or por­traits of hero­ic fight­ers who had been killed in the war. These per­son­al pho­to por­traits are includ­ed in the pho­to­book as visu­al tes­ti­mo­ni­als of war vic­tims. They are dis­played in par­tic­u­lar pre­sen­ta­tion modes, one of which is hands hold­ing out the pho­to­graph to show it to the cam­era. The ges­ture is demon­stra­tive, per­haps part­ly reproach­ful, but at the same time lov­ing, car­ing, and pro­tec­tive. It also points to pho­tographs as images that are hand­ed over and col­lec­tive­ly shared. On a more gen­er­al lev­el, it is evi­dence of pho­tog­ra­phy as a mode of transmission.

The touch­ing hand here con­nects the lives of the sur­viv­ing refugees with the lost lives of their deceased fam­i­ly mem­bers, most of them sons and broth­ers killed in Mujahideen fight­ing but some of them unin­volved chil­dren. If this body part is shown as an open palm from which one can read the family’s war his­to­ry (as in Fig. 8), it trans­forms into a pars-pro-toto por­trait of the per­son pre­sent­ing it.

Anoth­er form of memo­r­i­al por­trait demon­stra­tion is vis­i­ble in pre­sent­ing the photo­graph on the ground. The stony and dry sub­soil forms a stark con­trast to the por­trait photo.

In the case of Abdul Malik (Fig. 9), the paper print of the pho­to­graph­ic por­trait is anchored to the naked earth with stones to pre­vent it from fly­ing off. If con­sid­ered in con­junc­tion with the pho­tographs of bur­ial grounds inter­spersed with the vic­tim por­traits, this and the oth­er images of lost per­sons set against the earth can be inter­pret­ed as death por­traits, recall­ing the pres­ence of the per­son in absence. Through his pic­tures of the pho­to­graph­ic por­trait, Sheikh is able to inscribe biogra­phies of suf­fer­ing and hero­ic mar­tyr­dom direct­ly in his visu­al storytelling.

In this con­text, it is impor­tant to note that the por­trait nev­er exists in iso­la­tion in Sheikh’s work. In no case is it a sin­gle image. Embed­ded in a series, it forms numer­ous rela­tion­ships with oth­er por­traits. In the inter­re­la­tion­al bonds thus con­struct­ed, even non‑portraits (such as land­scape and gravesite pho­tographs) can be rein­ter­pret­ed as por­trait pic­tures. Nei­ther is the por­trait-based inter­con­nect­ed­ness lim­it­ed to the con­fines of the pho­to­book as a nar­ra­tive unit of sto­ry­telling. Sheikh often cir­cu­lates and recir­cu­lates his por­traits from one pho­to project to the next. The migra­tion of the peo­ple por­trayed is reflect­ed in the migra­tion of por­trait images through­out his œuvre.

Fur­ther­more, the life cycle of por­trai­ture is expressed in Sheikh’s repeat vis­it­ing and re-pho­tograph­ing of peo­ple. Aim­ing for long-term life doc­u­men­ta­tion, he want­ed to find out what became of the refugees he had pho­tographed. Accord­ing­ly, in A Camel for the Son, por­traits from the ear­li­er work A Sense of Com­mon Ground were repub­lished in a new arrange­ment: with a slight­ly dif­fer­ent nar­ra­tive order, new por­traits of the peo­ple por­trayed were pre­sent­ed along­side the old. Par­tic­u­lar­ly with the most recent group of por­trait revis­its, Sheikh was able to demon­strate how babies and chil­dren had grown into ado­les­cents in refugee camps, spend­ing most of their pre­cious life­time there. The por­tray­als did not always deter­mine how the new­er por­traits were cast; some­times, in the reverse of this, the course of life was deci­sive for the life imag­ing in the por­traits. This is illus­trat­ed well in Sheikh’s pho­to­book Ramadan Moon, in which the light-and-shad­ow play in the por­trait images of Soma­li refugee Seynab Azir Wardeere is an illu­mi­na­tive reflec­tion of the phas­es of the moon as a nat­ur­al cycle of life. Final­ly, the more recent pho­to­book Por­traits can be seen as a meta‑portrait, in that it was com­piled from por­traits orig­i­nat­ing in all of his var­i­ous pho­to (book) projects. Far from being an image-rich refugee-themed cof­fee table book, it con­tains the entire­ty of the tex­tu­al infor­ma­tion nec­es­sary for read­ing the images in accor­dance with their orig­i­nal pub­li­ca­tion con­text, but with­in a new enti­ty. By assem­bling and con­nect­ing indi­vid­ual por­trait images into a new order, it estab­lish­es cohe­sion and togeth­er­ness in its cycling and recy­cling. As Cada­va (2011, 11) has point­ed out, the togeth­er­ness thus cre­at­ed “here means otherness—it is what moves the image away from itself, what pre­vents it from exist­ing ‘on its own,’ what ensures it will be trans­formed and altered in rela­tion to the oth­er por­trait.” In the end, this togeth­er­ness of com­piled por­traits con­sti­tutes glob­al human­i­tar­i­an por­trai­ture of dis­placed, expelled, and exclud­ed peo­ple around the world.

4. Photodocumentaries as refiguration zones: The derefugisation of refugee portraiture

In the pho­to­books dis­cussed above, the life imag­ing of refugees and exiles fol­lows a sociopo­lit­i­cal agen­da of human­i­tar­i­an pho­to­jour­nal­ism and photodoc­u­men­tarism. With­in this frame­work, it ven­tures into iss I ues of human­i­ty, human­ness, and human rights. The life con­di­tion of dis­place­ment in tur­bu­lent times of migra­tion casts into relief the fun­da­men­tal ques­tion of the right to live and what it means to be human. The refugee, deprived of civ­il and civic rights, exclud­ed from any form of polit­i­cal par­tic­i­pa­tion, intro­duces, accord­ing to Han­nah Arendt, a break­down in our con­tem­po­rary under­stand­ing of human rights. In her book The Ori­gins of Total­i­tar­i­an­ism, she con­nects the decline of the nation-state with the end of the rights of man. Bind­ing human rights to cit­i­zen rights, she argues that “the para­dox involved in the loss of human rights is that such loss coin­cides with the instant when a per­son becomes a human being in general—without a pro­fes­sion, with­out an opin­ion, with­out a deed by which to iden­ti­fy and spec­i­fy” the self (1958, 297). From today’s per­spec­tive of transna­tion­al­iza­tion, it can be stat­ed that “[t]he cri­sis with­in human rights aris­es from the fact that, with the appear­ance of the refugee, the pre­sum­ably sacred and inalien­able rights of man are shown to be entire­ly alien­able, to lack any pro­tec­tion or real­i­ty at the very moment in which they can no longer be under­stood as rights belong­ing to cit­i­zens of a state, or to mem­bers of a par­tic­u­lar polit­i­cal com­mu­ni­ty” (Cada­va, 2011, 8). In all-too-human­ness, the “bare life” of the refugee, the loss of human rights takes flesh­ly form.

The Sheikh photodoc­u­men­taries con­sid­ered here cap­ture this bare­ness of life while care­ful­ly doc­u­ment­ing the par­tic­u­lar caus­es, effects, and larg­er con­se­quences of mass migra­tion and refugeeism in clear­ly defined loca­tions and tight­ly con­fined com­mu­ni­ties. They por­tray dis­placed, dis­pos­sessed, mar­gin­alised, silenced, and vic­tim­ized peo­ple who, devoiced and with­out a face, lack means of self-artic­u­la­tion and self-rep­re­sen­ta­tion. Por­trai­ture is employed as a method, imag­ing genre, and visu­al­iza­tion strat­e­gy to ren­der the face­less seen, to give the silenced a voice with which to tell their sto­ries, to allow the effaced to reface. The pho­to­book lends itself to this. It serves as an apt medi­um for the process of por­trai­ture in that it pro­vides ample pos­si­bil­i­ties for nar­ra­tion and sto­ry­telling via both image sequenc­ing and pho­to-text links. It per­mits both cre­at­ing per­son­al accounts of indi­vid­u­als and gen­er­at­ing local micro‑histories of refugee com­mu­ni­ties, such as that of the Afghan exile com­mu­ni­ty in North­ern Pak­istan in The Vic­tor Weeps.

The por­trait image as a fig­u­ra­tion of the par­tic­u­lar plays a vital role in the pho­to­books ana­lyzed here for coun­ter­act­ing the uni­ver­sal­iz­ing and anonymiz­ing effect of refugee rep­re­sen­ta­tion. It entails par­tic­u­lar­iza­tion of the por­tray­al of human dis­place­ment on the lev­el of the pho­to­book nar­ra­tive, as well as of the por­trait of human beings on the lev­el of the indi­vid­ual image. The por­trait as an image of the par­tic­u­lar turns anony­mous refugee fig­ures into indi­vid­u­al­ized sub­jects and per­sons. Sheikh’s por­tray­al strat­e­gy is intend­ed to tran­scend the refugee sta­tus and role image of the pho­tographed sub­ject and dive into the com­plex­i­ty of this individual’s per­son­al life sto­ry. The recon­struc­tion of the per­sona is achieved through intense con­ver­sa­tion and co-cre­ative col­lab­o­ra­tion with the refugees, with­out neglect for their social envi­ron­ment. As Sheikh’s pho­to work involv­ing the Afghan refugee vil­lage in north­ern Pak­istan attests, even por­trait pho­tog­ra­phy can become a com­mu­nal event of life-record­ing. First-per­son accounts and doc­u­ments select­ed by the sub­jects them­selves; the nam­ing, local­iz­ing, and sit­u­at­ing of each per­son pho­tographed via the image cap­tion; and the par­tic­i­pa­to­ry prac­tice of auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal descrip­tions of por­traits sup­port this per­son­al­iz­ing sub­ject-cen­tred approach. Only in the for­mat of the pho­to­book as both a medi­um of visu­al sto­ry­telling and an archive for doc­u­men­ta­tion can the com­plex­i­ty of per­son­al­ized lives be unfold­ed. In the words of Sheikh, it is “the indi­vid­ual and his tes­ti­mo­ny that allows us to access broad­er themes—through the spe­cif­ic to gain entry to the uni­ver­sal. […] I try to encour­age the medi­um to pierce the alien­ation in a return to the basics of human­i­ty” (qtd. in Light 2010, 4).

In Sheikh’s pho­tog­ra­phy, the prac­tice of refugee por­trai­ture oper­ates on the basis of rela­tion­al por­trai­ture, as defined by pho­tog­ra­phy the­o­rist Daniel Palmer in his study Pho­tog­ra­phy and Col­lab­o­ra­tion (2017, 109 ff.). With this prac­tice, pho­tog­ra­phy is employed as a com­mu­ni­ca­tion instru­ment and a social means of estab­lish­ing cross-cul­tur­al encoun­ters and inter­per­son­al, among them inter‑community, rela­tions, there­by empow­er­ing the sub­jects to par­tic­i­pate in the pho­to­graph­ic act and co-cre­ate the final result. It is the medium’s poten­tial for col­lab­o­ra­tive knowl­edge-gen­er­a­tion that affords a qual­i­ta­tive shift from mere con­tact zones of pho­to cre­ation to refig­u­ra­tion zones of pho­to­graph­ic doc­u­men­ta­tion. In Sheikh’s photodoc­u­men­tary work, the tra­di­tion­al “infor­mal con­tract between the pho­tog­ra­ph­er and the pho­tographed” that tends “towards the pre­sen­ta­tion of an objec­ti­fied ‘oth­er’” (Palmer 2017, 109) is replaced by a “civ­il con­tract” of pho­tog­ra­phy char­ac­ter­ized by rec­i­p­ro­cal human encoun­ters and rela­tions. A civ­il (re)contract(ing) of pho­tog­ra­phy, as advo­cat­ed by Ariel­la Azoulay (2008), enables anyone—even a migrant, refugee, or state­less person—to pur­sue polit­i­cal agency and resis­tance through pho­tog­ra­phy, whether by address­ing oth­ers through pho­tog­ra­phy or by being addressed by pho­tographs. A new cit­i­zen­ry in migrant and refugee pho­tog­ra­phy, if ground­ed in rela­tion­al por­trai­ture, can aid in dimin­ish­ing, if not com­plete­ly avoid­ing, the oth­er­ing of the pho­tographed. After all, it con­tributes to a con­struc­tion of rela­tion­al vari­ants of the “oth­er por­trait” in which the derefu­giza­tion of refugee por­trai­ture becomes gras­pable and com­pre­hen­si­ble. For moments of intense human encoun­ters, the bod­ies, faces, and images in migra­tion are put on hold. Through the con­tract­ed still­ness of pho­tog­ra­phy, the fleet­ing­ness of human migrancy is drawn into the media pres­ence of social life imaging.