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| (1948-) |
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Medium/Discipline: Photography
Birthplace: Baltimore, Maryland
Maryland Affiliation: Born here
Prominent Theme: documentary photography; film-making; photojournalism
Gender: Female
Race/Ethnicity: White
Biography: Born in Baltimore in 1948, Susan Meiselas is renowned for her documentary photography that has been published widely and related to human rights in various regions throughout the world. Meiselas earned an M.Ed. in visual education from Harvard in 1970, and in that same year she started working as an assistant film editor on the Frederick Wiseman documentary, Basic Training. In 1972-74 she ran workshops for teachers and children in New York's South Bronx. As a consultant to the New York Public School System in open education, she designed and introduced a photographic curriculum for 4th to 6th graders. Supported by grants from the NEA and State Arts Commissions of South Carolina and Mississippi, she set up film and photography programs in rural southern schools. Subsequent projects combining teaching ideas, oral history and photography include Learning To See (1975) and A Photographic Genealogy, developed as a consultant to Polaroid Corporation. She also continued to work with teachers through the Center for Understanding Media, NYC.
For Meiselas' earliest documentary project, Carnival Strippers, initiated the first summer she worked with a camera, she spent three summers traveling with women striptease artists who performed at state and local county fairs. In the resulting book (1976), photographs were presented of the women on-stage and off, with each photograph accompanied by dialogue of various personalities associated with the striptease culture, be they the dancers, their boyfriends, the show managers, or paying customers. The subjects of individual photographs were not necessarily those represented by the accompanying text. Meiselas wrote, "I wanted to assimilate into their working environment and portray what was happening. It was as important to me to capture their ideas about what they were doing as it was to photograph them in the process of their working lives...I built a parallel narrative so that those voices, when read, would bring you into the process of experiencing that world in a different way than the photographs alone could." (Ken Light, Witness in our Time: Working Lives of Documentary Photographers. Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000, p. 101) As her work began to be shown in galleries, she always put photographs with either text on the walls or, better yet to her thinking, sound.
During the five years that she was working with carnival strippers, Meiselas taught at public schools as an artist-in-residence. Upon release of her book and related exhibition, she became affiliated with the Magnum photo agency co-operative. Meiselas became a Magnum nominee in 1976, an associate in 1977 and a full member in 1980. She said, "...I started to work in the world of photojournalism, but I've always kept my documentary approach." (Light, Witness in Our Time, p. 102) A Photographer Portfolio of Susan Meiselas can be found on the Magnum Photos site.
In 1977, Meiselas traveled to Nicaragua to photograph the civil war between General Anastasio Somoza García's dictatorship and the Sandinista opposition. Her book, Nicaragua, resulted from two years there. Meiselas was in El Salvador during the civil war there in the 1980s, where she photographed uncovered graves of four murdered American nuns. The circulation of these images prompted U. S. congressional investigations into El Salvador's right-wing death squads and the American role in the war (Light, Witness in Our Time, p. 99). In the village of El Mazote, she and journalists Ray Bonner and Alma Guermoprieta documented the Salvadoran massacre of civilians. Meiselas was working at the time for magazines such as The New York Times, London Times, Time, Geo and Paris Match. Meiselas was awarded the Robert Capa Gold Medal by the Overseas Press Club for "best photographic reporting or interpretation from abroad requiring exceptional courage and enterprise," as well as the Leica Medal for Excellence for her work in Central America. (Max Kozloff, Photojournalism in the 80s, University Art Gallery, University of Massachusetts; Brainerd Gallery, Potsdam College of the State University of New York, 1985).
Susan Meiselas has coordinated exhibitions, published books and codirected films. She worked on the exhibition and publication of both El Salvador: The Work of Thirty Photographers and Chile From Within which covered the coup through the Pinochet regime, and the films Living at Risk: The Story of a Nicaraguan Family (1986) and Pictures from a Revolution (1991) with Richard Rogers and Alfred Guzzetti.
In 1992, Meiselas began a six-year project on a visual history of Kurdistan with MacArthur Foundation fellowship funding. She began her work by joining other journalists and activists at Kurdish refugee camps on the border of Iran. In 1997, she published a major work on the history of the Kurds that was the result of collecting and rephotographing pictures from anthropologists, missionaries, photojournalists and the Kurdish people. An online excerpt from the introduction of Meiselas' book, Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History, provides a statement on her Kurdish work.. Susan Meiselas has developed a Web site called "akaKURDISTAN: A Place for Collective Memory and Cultural Exchange", which "offers a map and timeline for finding photographs and exploring stories about Kurdistan's history and culture; it presents photographs to identify, and invites to contribute with personal stories to the ongoing history of this dispersed community."
Susan Meiselas said the following of her work with the Kurds and the nature of her role of photographer as "witness": "The book I've done on Kurdistan is about encounter-the encounter of a variety of westerners, be they missionaries or anthropologists or photojournalists - looking at how they saw the Kurds and how they shaped the way the Kurds were seen. I see myself in that tradition of encounter and witness - a 'witness' who sees the photograph as evidence. A lot of my work has been based on a concern about human rights violations. That's where the word is the most appropriate. But the other side of 'witness' is that we do intervene, and we intervene by the fact of our presence in a particular place. We change how people see themselves sometimes and how others may come to see them." (Light, Witness in Our Time, 106)
Susan Meiselas has had many one-woman shows in New York, Chicago, London and Paris. Her work is
collected by both American and European museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York).
Education/Training: B.A. Anthropology, Sarah Lawrence College, 1970; M.Ed., Visual Education, Harvard University, 1971
Art-related Employment: art educator; photographer; filmmaker; photojournalist
Selected References: Harris, Melissa. "On Location: With Annie Leibovitz, Lorna Simpson, Susan Meiselas, Cindy Sherman, Adam Fuss, Joel-Peter Witkin, Jon Goodman," Aperture. no. 133, 1993, p. 24-32.
Light, Ken. Witness in our Time: Working Lives of Documentary Photographers. (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press), 2000.
Magnum Photos site.
Kozloff, Max. Photojournalism in the 80s: Claudia Andujar, Mary Ellen Mark, Susan Meiselas, Eugene Richards, Wendy Watriss. (University Art Gallery, University of Massachusetts; Brainerd Gallery, Potsdam College of the State University of New York), October 1985.
Meiselas, Susan. Carnival Strippers. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux), 1975, 1976.
Meiselas, Susan. Encounters with the Dani: Stories from the Baliem Valley. (New York: International Center of Photography), 2003.
Meiselas, Susan. "akaKURDISTAN: A Place for Collective Memory and Cultural Exchange".
Other Publications: partial list:
Meiselas, Susan et al. Chile From Within: 1973-1998. (New York, London: Norton), 1991.
Meiselas, Susan. El Salvador: The Work of 30 Photographers. Text by Carolyn Forché; chronology by Cynthia Arnson; edited by Harry Mattison, Susan Meiselas, Fae Rubenstein. (New York: Writers and Readers Pub. Cooperative), 1983.
Meiselas, Susan. Kurdistan: In The Shadow of History (New York: Random House), 1997.
Meiselas, Susan. Learn to See: A Sourcebook of 101 Photography Projects by Teachers and Students. The Polaroid Foundation, 1970.
Stevenson, Sara (essay). Magna Brava: Magnum's Women Photographers, Eve Arnold, Inge Morath, Martine Franck, Susan Meiselas, Marilyn Silverstone, Lise Sarfati. (Munich, London, New York: Prestel), 1999.
Meiselas, Susan. Nicaragua: June 1978-July 1979. (Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative), 1981.
Meiselas, Susan. Pandora's Box, (S. I. Magnum Editions), 2001.
Meiselas, Susan. Susan Meiselas: Photographs by the Recipient of the Hasselblad Prize 1994: [Exhibition] 10 September-6 November 1994, Hasselblad Center. (Göteborg, Sweden: The Center), 1994.
Maryland Institutions Holding Artworks: The Baltimore Museum of Art
Multiple-Artist Exhibitions: partial list:
Picturing the Modern Amazon, New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, NY, 2000.
Open City: Street Photographs 1950-2000, Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, UK, 2001.
Visions from America: Photographs from the Whitney Museum of American Art, 1940-2000, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, 2002.
Awards: Robert Capa Gold Medal for Outstanding Reportage, Overseas Press Club, 1979.
Leica Medal for Excellence, 1982.
ASMP Photojournalist of the Year, 1982.
MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, 1992.
National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, 1984.
Hasselblad Foundation Prize, 1994.
Nederlands Foto Instituut Grant, "Photoworks-in-Progress: Constructing Identity," 1999.
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