Meiselas, Susan

Susan Meiselas is a documentary photographer whose practice is an ongoing contemplation on power—whether personal, cultural, or political. Best known for her images of Central American political strife, war, and revolution, Meiselas’s work raises questions about the relationships and boundaries between photographer, subject, and society. She is interested in “the ethics of seeing” and the role of the photographer in constructing history with special attention to the experiences of individuals and communities outside of the mainstream. “It’s not a compositional issue only, to see,” she told San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. “It was this whole question of who owns history.”

Before her famous coverage of the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua during the late 1970s, Meiselas spent the summers of 1972-75 photographing and interviewing carnival strippers across New England, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina. The series, Carnival Strippers (1972-75), emerged during the Women’s Liberation Movement as an immersive exploration of feminist concerns of intimacy, vulnerability, performativity, and sexuality.

Susan Meiselas received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College, New York (1970) and MA in visual education from Harvard University, Boston (1971). She has been the President of Magnum Foundation since its founding in 2007. She has received many awards and grants including Leica Award for Excellence in 1982, a MacArthur Fellowship in 1992, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2015. Her work has been exhibited by Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; National Library of Paris; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; and Museo Jumex, Mexico City; to name a few. Meiselas’s work is in the permanent collections of Art Institute of Chicago; Tate Modern, London; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and many others.