Susan Meiselas: On the Frontline

by Susan Meiselas (Photographer), Mark Holborn (Editor)

In On the Frontline, one of the most influential photographers of our time, Susan Meiselas, provides an insightful personal commentary on the trajectory of her career--on her ideas and processes, and her decisions as a photographer. Applying a sociological training to the practice of witness journalism, she compares her process to that of an archaeologist, piecing together shards of evidence to build a three-dimensional cultural understanding of her subjects.
Meiselas achieved worldwide recognition for her photographic coverage of the Nicaraguan Revolution in 1979--first published in 1981 and now regarded as a seminal work of journalism--which followed her exploration of the experience of women on the carnival entertainment circuit, Carnival Strippers (1976). She went on to spend five years exploring and creating a new visual history of the Kurdish people, published as Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History (1997). In On the Frontline, she guides us through the thinking behind each, and many other projects besides, as well as her influential involvement in Magnum Photos as one of its earliest women members. One of the greatest contributors to the evolution of documentary storytelling, Meiselas here offers a compelling insight into her journey as a photographer and thinker.

Genres: Photography

256 pages, Hardcover

Published October 13, 2017

About the author

Susan Meiselas is a documentary photographer based in New York. She is the author of Carnival Strippers (1976), Nicaragua (1981), Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History (1997), Pandora’s Box (2001), Encounters with the Dani (2003) Prince Street Girls (2016), A Room Of Their Own (2017), Tar Beach (2020), and Carnival Strippers Revisited (2022).

Meiselas is well known for her documentation of human rights issues in Latin America. Her photographs are included in North American and international collections. In 1992 she was made a MacArthur Fellow and received a Guggenheim Fellowship (2015). Most recently, she received the first Women in Motion Award from Kering and the Rencontres d’Arles (2019), the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize (2019), and the Erich Salomon Award of the German Society for Photography (2022). Mediations, a survey exhibition of her work from the 1970s to present was initiated by the Jeu de Paume in Paris and traveled to Fundació Antoni Tàpies, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Instituto Moreira Salles in São Paulo, among others.

Meiselas has been the President of the Magnum Foundation since 2007, with a mission to expand diversity and creativity in documentary photography.

Reviews

[Brian Page · Rating 4 out of 5]

Susan Meiselas: On the Frontline is as much a coming of age story as it is a retrospective of the work of the noted documentary photographer. It opens with Meiselas’ trite and entirely forgettable pictures of her housemates done for her master’s program at Harvard. From the text, she comes across as a bimbo with a camera. Meiselas first achieved notice with her carnival strippers project, which she stumbled into. Several other projects followed, of varying worth, before her first really important work in Nicaragua, into which she also entered naively. “I had no idea where Nicaragua was on the map.” (p. 58) “…right from the beginning colour felt right. I couldn’t see the place or the people without it. I wasn’t intending to do something different….” (p. 60) Working as a conflict photojournalist was obviously a life-changing experience and occasion for significant growth. There followed outstanding and ground-breaking projects not only in conflicts in El Salvador and Kurdistan but meta-documentary projects incorporating the subjects (for lack of a better word) themselves and their memories. Her curated volume, Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History is unlike anything previous. The final piece, Pandora’s Box, really closes the circle begun by Carnival Strippers, and the comparison reveals the growth in sensitivity across a lifetime of work. Here’s a quote to leave you with: “The frontline is not just a geographical space; it is a cultural boundary, a social edge, a point of interface with time, a deep psychological frontier. The documentary photographer can cross the line and show that the conflict zone is not just a battleground in a distant land; it is also in our homes, it is self-inflicted, it is in our heads.” (p. 234)

[Javier Alegria · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesante, perspectivas interiores sobre el proceso creativo de una reportera de guerra. Me crea un conflicto sobre mi poca involucración política antes las injusticias en el mundo

[Betty-Lou · Rating 5 out of 5]

Words and photographs of war.