The pictures in Ether--Fazal Sheikh's first book in color--were made as a way to honor the experience of death and to try to comprehend its significance. Benares (Varanasi) is one of India's sacred cities, where many Hindus come to die in the belief that they will find salvation. As he walked its streets by night, Sheikh observed sleeping figures, shrouded in blankets, lost to an oblivion that seemed, in that holy city, to offer a simulacrum of death. In watching these ambiguous figures, which hover in the imagination between a dream state, sleep and death, Sheikh recalled his own...