Susan Meiselas

Updated on Sep 21, 2024

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Name Susan Meiselas Role Photographer		Artwork Molotov Man

Spouse Richard P. Rogers (m. 1979–2001) Movies Pictures from a Revolution, The Windmill Movie, Living At Risk Education Sarah Lawrence College, Harvard University Books Carnival strippers, Kurdistan, Susan Meiselas: In History, Nicaragua - June 1978‑July Similar People Jim Goldberg, Richard P Rogers, Bruce Gilden, Alex Webb, Paolo Pellegrin Profiles Tumblr

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

Susan Meiselas Magnum Photos Photographer Portfolio

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.

Susan Meiselas Susan Meiselas Innovator NPPA

After a relationship that spanned more than 30 years she married Richard P. Rogers shortly before his death in 2001.

Susan Meiselas DER Filmmaker Susan Meiselas

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Education

Meiselas was born in Baltimore, Maryland. She attended junior high school in Woodmere, New York. She earned her BA at Sarah Lawrence College and an MA in visual education at Harvard University. She received a Honorary Doctorates in Fine Arts from the Parsons School in 1986 and from The Art Institute of Boston in 1996.

Career

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After earning her degree from Harvard, she worked as an assistant film editor on the Frederick Wiseman documentary, Basic Training. From 1972 to 1974 she worked for New York public schools, running workshops for teachers and children in the Bronx and designing photography curriculum for 4th–6th graders. She also worked for the State Arts Commissions of South Carolina and Mississippi setting up photography programs in rural schools. She also worked as a consultant for Polaroid and the Center for Understanding Media in New York City.

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

In the late 1970s Meiselas documented the insurrection in Nicaragua and human rights issues in Latin America. Her most noted photograph from this project was Molotov Man, depicting a man (later found to be called 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. This became noted in its Nicaraguan context as a symbol of the Sandanista 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 reproduction Molotov, becoming a prominent case-study of re-use of art.

In 1981, she visited a village destroyed by the armed forces in El Salvador and took pictures of the El Mozote massacre, working with journalists Raymond Bonner and Alma Guillermoprieto. 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 10 years after the war. In 2004, Meiselas returned to Nicaragua and installed 19 mural sized images of her photographs on the original locations where they were taken. The project was called "Reframing History."

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.

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."

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. The project was in collaboration with Multistory, a local community arts charity, who published a book of the work, A Room of Their Own (2017).

Publications by Meiselas

Learn to See. USA: Polaroid Foundation, 1975. A collaboration with the Polaroid Corporation.

Carnival Strippers. USA: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976; Germany: Steidl, 2003. ISBN 978-3-88243-954-0.

Nicaragua, June 1978 – July 1979. USA: Pantheon, 1981, ISBN 978-0-906495-67-4. New York: Aperture, 2008, ISBN 978-1-59711-071-6.

El Salvador: The Work of Thirty Photographers. USA: Pantheon, 1983; Writers and Readers, 1983.

Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History. USA: Random House, 1997. USA: University of Chicago Press, 2008. ISBN 978-0-226-51928-9.

Pandora’s Box. Denmark: Magnum Editions/Trebruk, 2001. ISBN 978-0-9538901-1-8. On S&M in New York.

Encounters with the Dani. USA/Germany: International Center of Photography/Steidl, 2003. ISBN 978-3-88243-930-4.

In History: Susan Meiselas. Edited by Kristen Lubben. Text by Meiselas, Caroline Brothers, Edmundo Desnoes, Ariel Dorfman, Elizabeth Edwards and David Levi Strauss. USA/Germany: International Center of Photography/Steidl, 2008. ISBN 978-3-86521-685-4. Published in conjunction with an exhibition.

Prince Street Girls.

Paris: Yellow Magic Books, 2013. Edition of 200 copies.

Oakland, CA: TBW Books, 2017. Subscription Series #5, Book #2. ISBN 978-1-942953-28-9. Edition of 1000 copies. Meiselas, Mike Mandel, Bill Burke and Lee Friedlander each had one book in a set of four.

A Room of Their Own. West Bromwich, England: Multistory, 2017.

Publication edited by Meiselas

Chile From Within. Edited by Meiselas. USA: W.W. Norton, 1993. Photographs by Paz Errazuriz et al. ASIN B001F9BUBS. Texts by Ariel Dorfman and Marco Antonio de la Parra.