Susan Meiselas: In History

by Susan Meiselas (Photographer), Caroline Brothers, Edmundo Desnoes

Since the 1970s, questions of ethics raised by documentary practice have been central to debates in photography. Perhaps no other photographer has so closely and consistently represented and participated in these debates than Susan Meiselas. An American photographer best known for her work covering the political upheavals in Central America in the 1970s and 80s--including the El Mozote massacre in El Salvador--Meiselas' process has evolved in radical and challenging ways as she has grappled with essential questions about her relationship to her subjects, the use and circulation of her images in the media and the relationship of images to history and memory. Meiselas is under no illusions about the dual nature of the photographer's role as "The camera is an excuse to be someplace you otherwise don't belong. It gives me both a point of connection and a point of separation." Her tenacious engagement with these matters has made her a leading commentator in the debate on contemporary photojournalism. With 200 plates and contributions from some of photography's finest theorists--among them David Levi Strauss, Lucy Lippard, Kristen Lubben, Jan-Erik Lundstrom and Allan Sekula--this volume gives an overview of Meiselas' enormously varied and courageous work to date.

Genres: Photography

356 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 2008

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 · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is great in so many ways. As a retrospective, it offers a unique perspective on an artist's life and work. And no denying Meiselas is brilliant. Yet the book also drips with a bit too much self-importance.....