Ether

Moonlight does to a sleeping face the opposite of what candlelight does to a dead one. Each assists in an act of looking that has all the perversity of love in it, making a moving face still or a still face move. 

Aveek Sen


In his most recent book, Ether, Fazal Sheikh approaches sleepers and the dead. Walking the streets of the holy city of Benares (Varanasi, India) at night, he observed sleeping humans and dogs as well as bodies, lit only by the dim flickering of the surrounding fires and street lamps. Often wrapped in fabrics from top to bottom, the sleepers are not always visually separable from the corpses awaiting cremation. The portraits are interspersed with photographs of the starlit sky, of cremation pyres and their ashes, of cairns and provisional altars dotted with flowers. 


The pictures in Ether, which is Sheikh’s first work in colour, were made as a way to honour the experience of death and to try to comprehend its significance. To lose oneself in sleep is to abandon the senses and leave the way open to a dream state in which mind and body separate. Just as, in death, the soul leaves the physical body behind and takes to the air, becoming ether.


Fazal Sheikh was born in 1965 in New York City. The author of more than a dozen monographs, Sheikh’s work has been exhibited internationally at venues including Tate Modern, London; the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation in Paris; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, ICP and the UN in New York; and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow. Sheikh was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2005, and a Guggenheim Fellow, in 2012.