\   In the beginning may have been the word, but if so, the image was not far behind. We talk about the world around us using images and visual metaphors. Photography takes the connection one step further; the photographic image combines (and sometimes contrasts) the language of seeing with the language of making sense of an image. In the arresting oeuvre of Fazal Sheikh’s black-and-white photography, a small portion of which is on view at the Nelson-Atkins Museum as part of a touring exhibition curated by Joel Smith of the Princeton University Art Museum, the images are immediately familiar yet extend an air of mystery.

  

The Nelson’s show, “Beloved Daughters,” centers on recent work by the New York-born artist whose mother was white and whose father was Kenyan. The selections here are culled from two projects (and accompanying books): “Moksha,” which deals with the Indian widows of Vrindavan (the so-called “city of widows”); and “Ladli,” a sympathetic survey of Indian orphans and adolescent girls. In the portraits of the widows, many veiled, whole life stories can be summed up in a single straight-forward composition; the viewer seems able to penetrate the veil, perhaps because the sitter frequently has no physical presence, sloping one way or barely able to commit herself to posing. The images of the infants and teens force something deeper from the viewer, especially knowing these children, while not the iconic Indian beggars and limbless souls seen in cable-news documentaries and the insidiously slick “Slumdog Millionaire,” are living on the fringes of a strict society that demands rigid adherence to rules and religions. Together, these images make the exhibition’s title grimly ironic, even as the viewer (like Sheikh) wishes it to be a tonic to the times.

  

Fazal Sheikh’s work falls into that category of photojournalism, with an artistic twist: instead of the traveler who visits hotspots and war zones seeking an image to grab an entire conflict or crisis and encapsulate it in one frozen moment—the Vietnamese girl fleeing from a Napalm bomb; Capa’s photograph of a soldier staggering backward as a shot hits him in the Spanish Civil War—Sheikh is part of a movement in which the photographer becomes a kind of anthropologist, first coming to know the people in the area before asking permission for their participation. Walker Evans worked this way in the Depression-era South, as did Cartier-Bresson throughout his own Indian sojurn in 1947 (while roaming, he happened upon Gandhi’s murder and photographed that). Sheikh has journeyed around the world, from Brazil to Malawi to Pakistan; his Indian project has produced three impressionable volumes. In some ways its epic production recalls Louis Malle’s seven-hour film documentary “Phantom India,” though he viewed India as some sort of free-floating utopia in which life in all its multiplicities overlaps. Sheikh’s vision, born as much of activism as of art, tightens the focus.

  

The widows, Hindu and hidden from society (one sitter’s own recorded story of losing her husband who could not swim ends with her ascetic acceptance: “I must have done something wrong in my life for this to happen to my husband. I see him again and again in my dreams…I have sacrificed my life for whatever wrong I have done and now, at sixty-five, I want to focus only on Krishna”), represent a large segment of the Indian population. Critics have accused Sheikh of focusing only on the down side of India, perpetuating the Orientalist critique advanced by Edward Said; yet that could be implied of any group of images. How many years have dreamers come to New York or to Hollywood, based on photographs that implied the good life was just around the corner? Photography—even documentary—is never a substitute for serious reading, thinking and learning. Fazal Sheikh’s Indian photographs are art first, and the viewer’s call after that.

  

His eye for the striking image is made easier by India’s well-worn contrast: beauty amid poverty. Photographs in the show and in the books such as “Kalawati” (a young girl’s hands holding a small supply of roses to sell), “Kamala’s Hands” (which recalls Stieglitz’s sensuous renderings of Georgia O’Keeffe’s hands and exposed features), and “Rajeshwari’s mice, Chuni and Muni” (cropped to show two hands holding two white mice) illuminate few back stories; there is a long tradition in photography of withholding the text, much less the context. It is a matter for looking. As fashion photography on the Annie Leibovitz maximum impact level and art photography on the order of Cindy Sherman’s studio trickery have beguiled us into expecting more from photography (like 3-D now in animation), photographs that do not try for audacity seem like manual typewriters in an age of iMacs and iPhones: old and odd. This is an exhibition of photographs—they hang on the walls.

  

Photography is always an intrusion. It asks the viewer to think twice about an object or a scene that otherwise might be dismissed. Thus are the power and the presence of the camera; it records what the eye sees (and often what it does not see). Fazal Sheikh’s images in the Nelson show (overseen by the Museum’s Associate Photography Curator, April Watson) are alive both to the artist’s inspiration and to the subjects’ experiences. The intrusion here is minimal. Whether taking in an ashram or an outdoor scene (Vrindavan, ninety miles southwest of Delhi, is home to spectacular natural wildlife) or the face (or the back, even) of a young girl or old woman, one senses him painting with the camera, finding a moment that can last, and outlast the moment-to-come.

  

“Beloved Daughters: Photographs by Fazal Sheikh” runs through September 13, at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 4525 Oak Street, KCMO. Admission is free. For hours and information call 816-751-1278 or online at  HYPERLINK "http://www.nelson-atkins.org" www.nelson-atkins.org.