Fazal Sheikh (New York, 1965) graduated in 1987 from Princeton University and began his career as a photographer soon after. His work, which responds to an interest in documenting individuals who belong to displaced communities, is articulated through a corpus of black and white images that have as their main axis the concepts of memory, place, and exclusion. His first monographic series entitled A Sense of Common Ground (1996), which discusses the refugee camps in Kenya, earned him immediate recognition. From that point onward, he continued to document different realities in a series of books that construct a sustained vision through different subjects. His magnificent portraits stand out and manifest his commitment toward the people who are being depicted, as well as his belief in the ability of photography to bring their lives closer to the public.

His work has been on display at institutions such as the Fotomuseum Wintertur and Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris, and has been recognized with such distinctions as the Infinity Award of the International Center of Photography in New York in 1995 and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 2012. In 2016 his trilogy Erasure won the Kraszna-Krausz photography prize in London for the best photobook of the year. His photographs are part of the collections at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.