Harry Mattison: Vita

by Carolyn Forché, Gilles Peress (Text), Susan Meiselas (Text)

Best known for his work covering the political upheavals in Central America in the 1970s and '80s, Harry Mattison's life is one of extraordinary encounters and events. Surviving the death squads of El Salvador and Nicaragua, he went on to be present in the last days of apartheid in South Africa, documented the expulsion of the PLO from Lebanon to Tunisia, and witnessed some of the most spectacular political events of those decades.

During the years of hard-bitten journalism, questions of ethics raised by documentary practice were of central concern to Mattison. His own decision to abandon the pretense of impartial journalist (he was then photographic bureau chief for Time) to become an impassioned participant in a Soweto anti-apartheid rally in South Africa caused him to be ejected from that country, accused of "disseminating images of unrest." Mattison later made a decision to change his path to a more reflective one, and in the next decades, as a professor of political philosophy, he documented inner city Washington, Minnesota's Iron Range, and, in an ongoing multi-year project these last years, charted the unfolding psychological landscape underpinning modern China.

In this process Mattison has grappled with pivotal questions about a photographer's relationship to his subject, the use of images in the media, and the relationship of images to history and memory.

200 pages, Hardcover

First published October 15, 2013

About the author

Carolyn Forché was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1950. She studied at Michigan State University and earned an MFA from Bowling Green State University. Forché is the author of four books of poetry: Blue Hour (HarperCollins, 2004); The Angel of History (1994), which received the Los Angeles Times Book Award; The Country Between Us (1982), which received the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, and was the Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets; and Gathering the Tribes (1976), which was selected for the Yale Series of Younger Poets by Stanley Kunitz. She is also the editor of Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness (1993). Among her translations are Mahmoud Darwish's Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems with Munir Akash (2003), Claribel Alegria's Flowers from the Volcano (1983), and Robert Desnos's Selected Poetry (with William Kulik, 1991). Her honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1992, she received the Charity Randall Citation from the International Poetry Forum.

"