Simran, New Delhi, India

Fazal Sheikh is an artist/activist deeply concerned with global human rights issues, and is in many ways the inheritor of a tradition of empathetic social documentation that began with Lewis Hine. This photograph is part of Ladli (which means “beloved daughter”), a series that depicts young girls and women who live in a society where, despite progressive laws, their human, civil and economic rights are routinely suppressed. The Ladli series, combined with Sheikh’s Moksha series, which focuses on the plight of dispossessed widows, together depict the faces of young and old, portraying an eloquent picture of women’s prospects in a nation of 1.1 billion people.