The Final Friday Of August

This past Friday was the last Friday of the month, and so I attended the Denver Art Museum's Final Friday event.  As I mentioned in last month's post, I think the museum does not expect big crowds in the summer, and so uses this month to prepare for the major exhibits of the fall and winter.  I guess it is therefore no surprise that both the 7th floor of the north building and the third floor of the Hamilton (south) building have been closed for the past several months in preparation for new exhibits.  The big exhibit on display now is the work of photographer Fazal Sheikh, whose work focuses on displaced people in the third world.  I had never heard of until I attended the opening of the exhibit a few weeks ago, and found that his photographs, especially his black and white portraits, are very impressive..

 This past Friday night a recent immigrant to the U.S. from Iraq - also a photographer -  gave a talk about the exhibit, and curator of photography Eric Paddock (seen in the photograph on the right) gave a guided tour. Paddock pointed out that Sheikh's work mostly focuses on portraits of women, who bare the brunt of displacement and some of the still barbaric practices and beliefs in much of the third world.  We were shown the portraits of women who had lost their daughters to dowry rage, where the husband and his family, unhappy with a small dowry, wind up murdering the wife, often by setting her on fire.  This happens in many countries, including India, where I was surprised to learn that if a husband dies, the wife is often thrown out of her house to fend on her own.  Originally a widow was expected to throw herself onto her husband's funeral pyre, but since this is not done so much anymore (but amazingly still sometimes happens), they are cast aside instead. On exhibit in one room are a series of photographs (the Moksha series) taken of widows living at the Bhajan Ashram in Vrindavan, India, where they meditate and support themselves either begging or selling handicrafts on the street.

In other words, India does not seem like a very nice country, although a fascinating  one.  It is, in fact, Rick Steves' (host of Rick Steves' Europe on PBS) favorite country, although he has never done a travel episode from there.  New York City born Fazak Sheikh also seems to find it fascinating, and another room of the show features small color photographs taken during walks at night through the city of Varanasi, the spiritual capital of India, one of which is featured (along with moi) in the photo on the left.  At night around the ghats of the Ganges River, Sheikh took photos of people sleeping, who work selling things on the streets during the day, dead bodies waiting to be cremated and the ashes thrown into the river (it is believed one achieves salvation immediately if cremated here), and even animals sleeping along the banks.  The Ganges River is considered holy, and people come here to bath in it.  I myself would like to visit here one day, but I don't think I will bring my bathing suit.  The exhibit will be in Denver through November 12th (see http://denverartmuseum.org/exhibitions/common-ground-photographs-fazal-sheikh-1989-2013 for details) and then go to Portland).  Be sure to check out Fazal Sheikh's web site at https://www.fazalsheikh.org/.