I can still remember Wayne Gonzales’s series of paintings constructed around the figure of Lee Harvey Oswald and the Kennedy assassination, shown in 2001 at the Paula Cooper Gallery and at the Consortium of Dijon. Of particular note was the juxtaposition of paintings of an acid pink and yellow ad for Jack Ruby’s nightclub, a stripper who looked like Marilyn Monroe, and a ballistic diagram from the Warren Commission report (Magic Bullet Theory, 2001)—so many postphotographic indices of a history already constituted yet still in fragments. Far from the tidy narratives of Oliver Stone in his film

Most photographs take us back in time. Much rarer are those that follow us into the present with a seeming life of their own. The photos in Fazal Sheikh’s series “A Camel for the Son,” 1992–2000, and “The Victor Weeps,” 1996–98, are among the latter. The first grew out of Sheikh’s encounters with Somali families who had sought refuge in northeast Kenya after the outbreak of civil war in the early ’90s; the second out of his discovery of the three million Afghans who had similarly fled to northern Pakistan to escape the Soviet occupation, the warring mujahidin factions, or the Taliban. But Sheikh