Susan Meiselas Explained

Susan Meiselas
Birth Date:June 21, 1948
Birth Place:Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.
Occupation:Photographer
Alma Mater:Sarah Lawrence College, Harvard University
Known For:photos of Sandinista National Liberation Front insurgents in the Nicaragua Revolution in the 1970s

Susan Meiselas (born June 21, 1948) is an American documentary photographer. She has been associated with Magnum Photos since 1976 and been a full member since 1980. Currently she is the President of the Magnum Foundation. She is best known for her 1970s photographs of war-torn Nicaragua and American carnival strippers.[1]

Meiselas has published several books of her own photographs and has edited and contributed to others. Her works have been published in newspapers and magazines including The New York Times, The Times, Time, GEO, and Paris Match. She received the Robert Capa Gold Medal in 1979 and was named a MacArthur Fellow in 1992. In 2006, she was awarded The Royal Photographic Society's Centenary Medal and Honorary Fellowship and in 2019 the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize.

After a relationship that spanned more than thirty years, she married filmmaker Richard P. Rogers[2] shortly before his death in 2001.[3]

Early life and education

Meiselas was born on June 21, 1948, in Baltimore, Maryland. She attended junior high school in Woodmere, New York. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in 1970 from Sarah Lawrence College and a Master of Arts in visual education from Harvard University, where she was a student of Barbara Norfleet.[4] [5] She received honorary Doctorates in Fine Arts from the Parsons School in 1986 and The Art Institute of Boston in 1996.[6]

Career

After earning her masters degree from Harvard University, Meiselas was an assistant film editor on the Frederick Wiseman documentary Basic Training. From 1972 to 1974, she worked for New York City public schools, running workshops for teachers and children in the Bronx and designing photography curricula for 4th–6th graders.[7] In the mid-1970s, Meiselas began working on a project she later titled the Prince Street Girls, a series that features young and adolescent girls from Little Italy in New York City.[8] She also worked for the State Arts Commissions of South Carolina and Mississippi setting up photography programs in rural schools and served as a consultant to Polaroid and the Center for Understanding Media in New York City.[9]

Her first major photography project documented strippers at New England fairs and carnivals, which she worked on during summers while teaching in the New York City public schools. The project resulted in an exhibition at the Whitney Museum and a book, Carnival Strippers, that incorporated audio interviews with the subjects on a CD packaged with the book.[10]

In the late 1970s, Meiselas documented the insurrection in Nicaragua and human rights issues in Latin America. Her most notable photograph from this project was Molotov Man, which depicts a man (later identified as Pablo 'Bareta' Aruaz) poised to throw a molotov cocktail made from a Pepsi bottle in his right hand, while holding a rifle in his left hand. It became a symbol of the Sandinista revolution and was widely reproduced and remixed in Nicaragua. Latterly, outside this context, it was reproduced via an Internet meme based on Joy Garnett's 2003 painting Molotov, thus becoming a prominent case-study of the appropriation, transformation, and quotation in art.[11] [12] Her photographs of the Nicaraguan Revolution have been incorporated into local textbooks in Nicaragua. Her 1991 documentary film, Pictures from a Revolution, depicts her return to sites she photographed and conversations with subjects of the photographs as they reflect on the images ten years after the war.[13] In 2004, Meiselas returned to Nicaragua to install nineteen mural-size images of her photographs at the locations where they were taken. The project was called "Reframing History."[14]

In 1981, she visited a village destroyed by government forces in El Salvador and took pictures of the El Mozote massacre, working with journalists Raymond Bonner and Alma Guillermoprieto.

Beginning in 1992, Meiselas used MacArthur Foundation funding to curate a photographic history of Kurdistan, resulting in the book Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History and a corresponding website, akaKurdistan.[15]

In a 2008 interview with Phong Bui in The Brooklyn Rail, Meiselas says:

I don't want to relinquish the role and the necessity of witnessing and the photographic act as a response, a responsible response. But I also don't want to assume in a kind of naïve way … that the act of the making of the image is enough. What's enough? And what can we know in this process of making, publishing, reproducing, exposing, and recontextualizing work in book or exhibition form? … I can only hope that it registers a number of questions.[16]

Over several months in 2015 and 2016, Meiselas worked on a project about women in refuges in the Black Country area of the West Midlands, England.[17] The project was made in collaboration with Multistory, a local community arts charity, which published a book of the work, A Room of Their Own (2017).

Publications

Publications by Meiselas

Publications edited by Meiselas

Films

Reviews

Awards

Collections

Meiselas' work is held in the following permanent collections:

Exhibitions

Further reading

External links

Notes and References

  1. "Photographer Susan Meiselas on documenting women's refuges". Rachel Cooke, The Observer, 21 My 2017. Retrieved May 24, 2017
  2. News: Richard Rogers, Harvard Film Teacher, 57. July 18, 2001. The New York Times. March 3, 2019. 0362-4331.
  3. Web site: The Windmill Movie: Two filmmakers collaborate across the gulf between life and death.. Craig . Lambert . Harvard Magazine. May 2009.
  4. Web site: A Conversation with Susan Meiselas '70, Eduardo Cadava, and Joel Sternfeld. sarahlawrence.edu. March 3, 2019.
  5. https://harvardmagazine.com/2010/11/a-lens-on-history Harrison J. A Lens on History, Harvard Magazine Nov–Dec 2010
  6. Book: Hudson, Berkley. Encyclopedia of Journalism. limited. SAGE. 2009. 978-0-7619-2957-4. Sterling. Christopher H.. Thousand Oaks, California. 1060–67.
  7. News: Susan Meiselas: Breaching Boundaries in Photography. Estrin. James. July 3, 2018. The New York Times. March 3, 2019. 0362-4331.
  8. Web site: Prince Street Girls New York (1976-2011) Susan Meiselas. 2020-07-12. www.susanmeiselas.com.
  9. Web site: Maryland art source . December 14, 2010 . December 4, 2010 . https://web.archive.org/web/20101204160017/http://www.marylandartsource.org/artists/detail_000000123.html . dead .
  10. Web site: Susan Meiselas. The Museum of Modern Art.
  11. Stephen Marvin, 'Copyright Innovation in Art', International Journal of Conservation Science, 4 (2013), 729–734 (pp. 731—72).
  12. Joy Garnett and Susan Meiselas, 'On the Rights of Molotov Man: Appropriation and the Art of Context', Harper's Magazine (February 2007), 53–58 (pp. 56–57), http://www.firstpulseprojects.com/On-the-Rights-of-Molotov-Man.pdf .
  13. Web site: Pictures from a Revolution (1991). October 5, 1991. IMDb.
  14. Web site: Reframing History web gallery . Susanmeiselas.com . August 26, 2014 . dead . https://web.archive.org/web/20140827034001/http://www.susanmeiselas.com/nicaragua/ . August 27, 2014 .
  15. Web site: aka KURDISTAN INTRODUCTION. www.akakurdistan.com. March 3, 2019.
  16. Bui. Phong. In Conversation: Susan Meiselas with Phong Bui. The Brooklyn Rail. November 2008.
  17. "Stories: A Room of Their Own: Susan Meiselas". Multistory. Retrieved May 24, 2017
  18. Web site: Artist: Susan Meiselas. International Center For Photography. May 5, 2019.
  19. Web site: Susan Meiselas. Hemispheric Institute. July 3, 2016. April 12, 2017. https://web.archive.org/web/20170412045015/http://hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/en/enc09-visual-art/item/123-susan-meiselas. dead.
  20. Web site: Susan Meiselas. New York University Tech.
  21. Web site: Susan Meiselas. MacArthur Foundation.
  22. Web site: Past Maria Moors Cabot Prizes Winners. . February 12, 2018.
  23. Web site: ICP New York honours Peter Magubane. Art South Africa. dead. https://web.archive.org/web/20160916120852/http://artsouthafrica.com/archives/archived-featured-articles/212-main-archive/archived-featured-articles/1317-icp-new-york-honours-peter-magubane.html. September 16, 2016.
  24. "Susan Meiselas", Hasselblad Foundation. Retrieved January 5, 2015.
  25. "2005 Infinity Award: Cornell Capa Award". International Center of Photography, April 4, 2005. Retrieved May 24, 2017
  26. Web site: Centenary Medal . rps.org . November 7, 2018.
  27. "Susan Meiselas Named Harvard Arts Medalist". Harvard Magazine, December 22, 2010. Retrieved May 24, 2017
  28. Web site: Susan Meiselas. May 24, 2017 . .
  29. News: O'Hagan. Sean. 2019-05-16. 'Especially relevant': Susan Meiselas wins 2019 Deutsche Börse photography prize. en-GB. The Guardian. 2020-07-12. 0261-3077.
  30. News: Discover Art & Artists. 2020-07-12. The Art Institute of Chicago. en.
  31. Web site: Susan Meiselas, United States, born 1948 Birmingham Museum of Art. 2020-07-12. en-US.
  32. Web site: Harvard. Harvard Art Museums. 2020-07-12. www.harvardartmuseums.org. en.
  33. Web site: Eastman House to acquire important photographs of Rochester by 10 Magnum photographers George Eastman Museum. 2020-07-12. www.eastman.org.
  34. Web site: The Jewish Museum. 2020-07-12. thejewishmuseum.org.
  35. Web site: Women Photojournalists: Susan Meiselas - Introduction & Biographical Essay (Prints and Photographs Reading Room, Library of Congress). 2020-07-12. www.loc.gov.
  36. Web site: Magnum Photos Collection Opens to Researchers, Students and Public . www.hrc.utexas.edu . dead . https://web.archive.org/web/20100622040912/http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/press/releases/2010/magnum.html . 2010-06-22.
  37. Web site: Museum of Contemporary Photography. 2020-07-12. www.mocp.org.
  38. Web site: Muchachos Await Counter Attack by the National Guard, Matagalpa, Nicaragua | the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston . March 6, 2018 . March 7, 2018 . https://web.archive.org/web/20180307023130/https://www.mfah.org/art/detail/82693?returnUrl=%2Fart%2Fsearch%3Fartist%3DSusan%2BMeiselas . dead .
  39. Web site: Susan Meiselas. Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. March 6, 2018.
  40. Web site: Meiselas, Susan. 2020-07-12. SFMOMA. en-US.
  41. Web site: Susan Meiselas. 2020-07-12. whitney.org. en.
  42. "October 11, 2017 – January 14, 2018", Fundació Antoni Tàpies. Retrieved November 24, 2017
  43. "Susan Meiselas: Mediations: from 06 February 2018 until 20 May 2018: Concorde, Paris". Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume. Retrieved March 6, 2018.
  44. Cat Lachowskyj, "Huge Susan Meiselas retrospective goes on show in Paris on 06 February". British Journal of Photography, January 17, 2018. Retrieved March 6, 2018.
  45. News: Susan Meiselas: from the dressing room to the danger zone – in pictures. February 7, 2018 . March 6, 2018 . . London .
  46. Web site: Bailey . Jacque . 2022-12-03 . International Center of Photography . 2022-12-03 . International Center of Photography.

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