Master Profiles: Susan Meiselas

* “Master Profiles” is a series profiling all the great photographers of uncontrolled life. Unlike the rest of the blog, I’m doing these in a straight profile format to make it easy for quick access to facts, quotes and knowledge on all the masters. I’ll also group them together here every time I add a new one.

Profile:

Susan Meiselas (1948-Present)

American photographer known for her coverage of the insurrection in Nicaragua and documentation of human rights issues in Latin America, among other subjects.

Background:

Born: June 21, 1948 in Baltimore, Maryland, USA

Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Susan received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College and her MA in visual education from Harvard University. While teaching photography in New York public schools, her first major photographic project involved documenting the lives of striptease performers at New England country fairs over the course of three summers. In 1976, this work was published as a book titled Carnival Strippers. Since then, it has been reprinted by Steidl Verlag and installed at the Whitney Museum of Art. This series led to her joining the prestigious Magnum Photos agency in 1976, where she became a freelance photographer. Shortly after Carnival Strippers, she also worked on a project titled Prince Street Girls which covered female youth and femininity in a Manhattan neighborhood known as ‘Little Italy,” where she had recently moved.

Starting in 1978, she covered the insurrection in Nicaragua and in 1981 published her second monograph, Nicaragua, June 1978–July 1979. Her documentation of the Nicaragua insurrection and other human rights issues in Latin America have become some of the work she is best known for today, including her famous photo below, titled Molotov Man.

Following Nicaragua, she worked extensively in El Salvador and Chile, documenting their political struggles. She also worked in Kurdistan, where she later curated the book entitled Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History, which included work of her own. Susan has since worked on documentary projects ranging from the Dani, the indigenous people of the highlands of Papua in Indonesia, to New York S&M clubs. Her work has been exhibited around the world and some of her awards include the Robert Capa Gold Medal for “outstanding courage and reporting” and the Leica Award for Excellence. In 1992, she was named a MacArthur Fellow. She continues her photography work today, with a current traveling exhibition titled Mediations, a retrospective of her work from the 1970s to today that covers her personal approach to making photos.

Style/Themes:

Humanist/personal with tension
Human rights and conflict documentary
Femininity from a female perspective

Gear: Leica M / Canon 5D / 35mm

While there’s not much information available on gear when it comes to Susan, she was known to use a Leica M4 with a Summicron-M 35mm earlier in her career. She started with Leica due to their unobtrusive size during her Carnival Strippers project. Later, she switched completely to digital and shoots with the Canon 5D Mark line of cameras.

Quotes:

“Finding a photograph is often like picking up a piece from a jigsaw-puzzle box with the cover missing. There’s no sense of the whole. Each image is a mysterious part of something not yet revealed.”

“For a long time I’ve lived with the inadequacy of that frame to tell everything I knew, and I think a lot about what is outside of the frame…”

“I see myself in [the] tradition of encounter and witness—a “witness” that sees the photograph as evidence.”

“You look at photographs that freeze time, but then time moves.”

“If Instagram had been available when I was working in Nicaragua in 1978, I’m sure I would have wanted to use it as a way of reporting directly from the streets during the insurrection. “

“We know photographers make frames, but we deeply believe they can also create frameworks. “

“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.”

“Dig in, follow your instincts and trust your curiosity.”

“What worries me is that we want to close down our relationship to the world at large. In other words, people’s instincts are overwhelmed by the amount of images, or they can’t distinguish anymore between Rwanda or Bosnia or Somalia.”

“It’s a strange experience… the photograph is like an object frozen in time, and people’s lives go on.”

“Looking at contact sheets, it’s a great set of footprints. Either you got it or you didn’t. You could have gotten it, you should’ve moved. I think you’re plagued with that and then suddenly you find a frame and it just seems to be there, it just seems to know itself and sort of reveal itself. That’s the harmony.”

“I think photography has a huge potential to expand a circle of knowledge. There’s a reality that we are all the more linked globally and we have to know about each other. Photography gives us that opportunity.”