Introduction
Fazal Sheikh
In the summer of 2020, while in the grip of the pandemic, with lockdowns mandated across the world and violence against people of color escalating in the United States, a sense of the world being slowly upended took root in our souls. Confined to our homes, many of us shared personal exchanges throughout the days and nights across the miles of solitude. From Zurich, where my partner Alexandra and I were locked down, it was hard to imagine that only a few weeks earlier I had been planning to travel with my friend, the writer Terry Tempest Williams, to one of the largest oil and gas installations in the western United States, part of a project to examine the impact of industrial-scale mineral extraction on the American southwest and the effects of environmental racism on the Native communities with whom we were in partnership.
In 2017, a few months after Terry and I first met, I had visited her at her home in Castle Valley, Utah, where she lives with her husband, Brooke Williams. We were en route to Bluff, a town in the southern corner of the state, where she had arranged for us to meet with the elders of Utah Diné Bikéyah, the five-tribe coalition which had succeeded in winning approval for the protection of 1.35 million acres of land in southeastern Utah. The establishment of Bears Ears National Monument on December 28, 2016 had been one of the last acts of President Barack Obama. Less than a year later, as one of the first acts of his new administration, President Trump, through an executive order, reduced Bears Ears by eighty-five percent and nearby Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument by half, a move that would enable extensive tracts of public lands to be opened to uranium mining and oil and gas development.
As we surrendered ourselves to the new uncertainties, Terry and I explored new ways to continue our collaboration. We maintained an intense correspondence, checking in with one another to be sure that family and friends were okay, venting anger and disbelief at the news as it arrived each morning, and generally offering one another the comfort of solidarity and a shared perspective. We also questioned the role of art in such circumstances, asking each other how it might be used to offer empathy, inspiration, as well as solace to others.
Our friend Jonah Yellowman, spiritual leader of Utah Diné Bikéyah, fellow artist, and collaborator, had reflected upon the ravages the virus was wreaking upon his own community. This was a time to go deeper, he told us, to become more introspective about the way in which we lived our lives. And as the days passed, his words settled into my being and I took refuge in the process of making, selecting, and printing images from my last travels with Jonah. This in itself provided a focus and relief from the anxieties brought on by the world outside. I then set myself the task of preparing a personal gift for Terry. I decided to review the thirty years of my work as an artist and gather together thirty photographs, one from each year, each to represent a single day in a lunar cycle. I named it “Thirty Moons.”
I would rise each morning, gradually lured from the confines of my studio by tentacles of memory, back to the moment of having made the image. It was an instinctive desire to draw lessons from the people who had welcomed me into their communities in the years before. I have always felt that it was important to make work that reaches across the divisions of race, gender, religion, and national borders. If we are limited to speaking for our own racial or national group—in my case, one which is already fractured and multi-ethnic—then how do we help to foster a wider understanding of others? This was, I knew, a belief that Terry, in her work, shared: that it was possible to speak with another respectfully, and sensitively, rather than for another, and to communicate on a human level that transcends these differences. The month of gathering, comparing, and preparing the images offered an opportunity to consider anew, and more deeply, what this work has meant to me; how immersion in the act of making provides not merely its own form of solace, but a grounding for the soul.
While I was engrossed in the process of looking through the images, searching for those that might resonate with Terry, outside in the world protests against racial violence were taking center-stage across the United States, and in Europe thousands were joining in solidarity. Demonstrators were crossing historic lines of division that at one time demanded that people of color speak for themselves. Suddenly, a breakthrough was being made, one which may prove to be the most enduring impact of these months of unpredictability.
As I prepared the parcel for Terry, I had no expectation of anything in return. For me, the chance to have such a determined focus has been the most important thing, and to be able to offer a gift in honor of our collaboration.
Having dispatched it, we continued our correspondence, texting, speaking, and emailing on everything from the severity of the upheaval and roiling dissent in America, to news from friends in the Navajo Nation and other Native communities struggling in disproportionate measure with the virus, to the growing shift toward fascism and xenophobia that was taking hold in the country of our birth. All these conversations were punctuated with updates about our loves, our families, with moments of great sadness and soaring raucous laughter to soothe the pain of loss.
Then, in early August, a parcel arrived in Zurich unannounced, having traveled from Utah to my door. Terry and I share a tradition of allowing a special package to rest for a time, as if preparing for the encounter with its contents. A couple of days later, I opened the parcel and found a sheaf of paper, tied with a sprig of sage, and a letter dated August 6 in Terry’s distinctive handwriting:
My Dearest Fazal,
From my hands to yours.
From the Thunder Moon in July to the Sturgeon’s Moon in August, I
wrote you these letters not by hand, but by heart, in response to
and inspired by each photograph in 30 Moons. They are personal.
They are casual; more stream of consciousness than polished
thoughts and some may be a ramble from the desert. I simply let
the force of each image carry me. I have loved living, feeling,
and thinking with you, Fazal, as I entered these portraits and
portals of 30 Moons for 30 days.
It has been a beautiful and challenging practice as a writer and
as your friend.
And to this she appended a quote from one of her favorite writers:
You will get letters, very reasoned and illuminated, from many people; I cannot write you that sort of letter now. I can only tell you that I am shaken, which may seem to you useless and silly, but which is really a greater tribute than pages of calm appreciation.
— Virginia Woolf
The manuscript was bound with a thin turquoise leather chord. As I sifted through the pages, I could see that each day opened with a re-photographed image—the original having been laid on one of Terry’s patterned fabrics, as if to represent its new home. One image for each day of the moon’s cycle.
That afternoon, I sat down with Alex and read each letter aloud, making my way through them in a sitting. By the end, it was clear that the insights Terry had given with such loving care to the images had brought the gift full circle; and this, despite the miles of our separation and weeks of imposed isolation.
In the following days, I returned often to the letters, enlivened by Terry’s fresh perspective. As our exchanges continued, the idea grew in me that since they addressed so many aspects of the current situation, questioning the extremes of political, social and racial divides, maybe these letters could be shared with a wider public. I proposed that we publish “Thirty Moons” in book form in the hope that it might reach others who were feeling equally undone and pulled away from life’s moorings.
Terry was hesitant in the beginning about making the letters public. The letters were honest and unchecked expressions–in her words, “like a jazz riff.” But then, we realized, we are all vulnerable. This is our shared offering born out of a vibrant friendship in the midst of a global pandemic—a modest and heart-felt project, made at a time of isolation, to soothe and comfort others, as we have comforted one another.