Salih Basheer

Salih Basheer (Arabic: صالح بشير‎, born 1 January 1995) is a Sudanese photographer.

Since 2018, he has been awarded grants and prizes for photography, including by the Arles Photography Festival, the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture (AFAC), Magnum Foundation and the Prince Claus Fund. His photo stories have been exhibited in Ethiopia, the Netherlands, Germany, the United Kingdom, France and the United Arab Emirates. His 2023 publication 22 Days in Between was called the first photo-book ever by a Sudanese photographer.

Early life and education Basheer was born in Omdurman, Sudan. After finishing secondary school in Sudan, he moved to Cairo in 2013 and received his Bachelor's degree in Geography from Cairo University in 2017. During his studies in Egypt, he started as a self-taught photographer.

Life and work After his graduation, Basheer began to work on his first long-term project titled Sweet Taste Of Sugarcane. This visual story was exhibited in October 2021 at the Diffusion Festival in Cardiff, Wales, and the same year in France as part of the group exhibition "Mon ami n'est pas d'ici" at the Institut du Monde Arabe's exhibition space in Tourcoing, as well as at the festival "Les Rencontres à l'échelle" in Marseille.

In 2020, Basheer started a diploma course in photojournalism at the Danish School of Media and Journalism (DMJX) in Aarhus and was awarded a scholarship by The VII Foundation. In addition, he obtained the Shahidul Alam Grant for the development of independent photojournalism by the Danish School of Media and Journalism.

In 2021, Basheer received the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund student grant for his narrative project 22 Days in Between, remembering the loss of his parents and the challenges of settling into a new home with his grandmother. According to the fund, "This project is Salih's visual process of learning more about his parents and himself and serves as a method of healing from the trauma of losing his parents. Salih says that having a camera in his hand gave him the courage and comfort level to ask questions about his parents and their deaths." For the same visual story, Basheer was awarded the Everyday Projects Grant. In 2022, he received another grant from AFAC through their visual arts program for 22 Days in Between. His photographs were selected for the 2022 African Photography Encounters in Bamako, Mali.

In June 2022, the British Journal of Photography presented Basheer as one of 15 upcoming photographers to watch. In January 2023, Basheer published 22 Days in Between, the first ever photo-book by a Sudanese photographer, that evokes his early childhood and memories of his parents, who died within the period of 22 days, when Basheer was only 3 years old. An article in the British Journal of Photography described this photo-book as an "introspective narrative [...] explored through various formats: personal writing, self-portraits, archive images, and drawings that Basheer drew recently but from the perspective of a child – to uphold the idea that he is still a kid longing to bond with his parents." In his review in The Washington Post, Kenneth Dickerman said:

Publications 22 Days in Between: Photographs from Sudan, Copenhagen: Disko Bay, 2023. .

The Return: 2026. .

Grants and awards

2021, W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund Student Grant 2021, Everyday Projects Grant 2019, Arab Documentary Photography Program, Magnum Foundation & the Prince Claus Fund 2022, AFAC Visual Arts Program 2022, Tasweer, The Sheikh Saoud Al Thani Awards 2022, Counter Histories initiative grant, Magnum Foundation 2022, Contemporary African Photography Prize, Shortlist 2023, Photo Textbook Award Winner at the Arles Photography Festival

Group and solo exhibitions 2018, Addis Foto Fest, group exhibition, fifth edition, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia 2019, Slideshow Fest, the Odesa Photo Days Festival, Odesa, Ukraine 2019, Vantage Point Sharjah 7, Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates 2019, Invisible Borders, slide show presentation, African Photography Encounters, Bamako, Mali 2020, Connecting views: 16 talents from the APJD, Africa Museum, Berg en Dal, the Netherlands 2021, World Press Photo exhibition, Oldenburg, Germany 2021, World Press Photo: Seen Through the lens of..., Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam 2021, Mon ami n'est pas d'ici, Institut du Monde Arabe-Tourcoing, Tourcoing, France 2022, African Photography Encounters, Bamako, Mali 2022-2023 , Institut du monde Arabe, Paris, France 2023, Blue: Children of January, at Photofairs NY