Sylvia Wolf

Deirdre English

Susan Meiselas

From 1972 to 1975, Susan Meiselas spent her summers photographing and interviewing women who performed striptease for smalltown carnivals in New England, Pennsylvania and South Carolina. As she followed the girl shows from town to town, she portrayed the dancers on stage and off, photographing their public performances as well as their private lives. She also taped interviews with the dancers, their boyfriends, the show managers and paying customers. Meiselas' frank description of the lives of these women brought a hidden world to public attention. Produced during the early years of the women's movement, "Carnival Strippers" reflects the struggle for identity and self-esteem that characterized a complex era of change. This revised edition contains a new selection of Meiselas' black-and-white photographs together with the original interview excerpts. Additionally, an audio CD featuring a collage of participants' voices and a 1977 interview with the photographer are included. Essays by Sylvia Wolf and Deirdre English reflect on the importance of this body of work within the history of photography and the history of feminism.

Carnival Strippers

A Room of Their Own is a visual narrative combining photographs, first hand testimonies and original art works. It was created through a series of collaborative workshops with Magnum photographer Susan Meiselas and women in refuge, in the Black Country, over 2015 and 2016. A Room of Their Own shares women’s experiences of domestic abuse and the process of entering refuge alone, or with their children, to the collective life within, to then becoming resettled in their own home.

A room of their own

Essays by Mistress Raven, Richard August and Mistress Delilah.

Pandora's Box

Found family photographs from New York's Little Italy portray a vanished way of life In Tar Beach, photographer and Little Italy resident Susan Meiselas (born 1948) brings together found pictures that were made, kept and gathered by various families who handed them down from 1940 to the early 1970s. Reflections from the community offer perspectives of multiple generations, as local author Angel Marinaccio says: "If you had an accomplishment--communion, confirmation, wedding, graduation or birthday, you'd dress up in your best outfit and go to the rooftop to take pictures and celebrate with your family." The introduction to Tar Beachis written by renowned filmmaker Martin Scorsese, who grew up on the streets portrayed in this collection. He writes: "The roof was our escape hatch and it was our sanctuary. The endless crowds, the filth and the grime, the constant noise, the chaos, the claustrophobia, the non-stop motion of everything ... you would walk up that flight of stairs, open the door, and you were above it all. You could breathe. You could dream. You could be." Meiselas, along with two of her neighbors, Angel Marinaccio and Virginia Bynum, collected and curated these vernacular photographs and memories to convey the feeling of this special place and time in the daily lives of Italian immigrants as they made their way to becoming part of American culture.

Life on the Rooftops of Little Italy 1920-75

Susan Meiselas: Tar Beach

Claire Rosenberg

Accompanying DVD in pocket at the rear of book.

Nicaragua, June 1978-July 1979

Kristen Lubben

Ariella Azoulay

Marianne Hirsch

Corey Keller

Eduardo Cadava

Işın Önol

This exhaustive monograph of Susan Meiselas will be released in occasion of the retrospective that will take place at Tàpies Foundation in Barcelone, Jeu de Paume in Paris and SFMOMA in San Francisco. Mediations is published by Damiani/Jeu de Paume/Fondation Tàpies. This exhibition and monograph propose a selection of works from the 1970s to today which reveal the particular approach of Susan Meiselas toward to the underlying reasons for making photographs, how the image concerns it's subject as much as the photographer and the role that these images can have at different levels in society and particularly in photojournalism. She questions the relationship between the image and the subject in such a way as to include the people portrayed in the image in the process of the making. There is nothing systematic in her approach: each work expresses in a very strong manner that context is vital to the understanding of photography. Therefore her work is specific to the persons portrayed, to the notion of community to which they belong and to the locality of the geographic and political territories that the artist addresses. The way of the showing the work is equally a part of the thought process. How does the spectator behold the artwork? It is often comprised of many parts, made in different media: each "layer" is used to document a level of meaning. For Meiselas one should be able to grasp why the image was taken. Both the subject of the image and the context in which the images are shown are taken into account in the elaboration of each project.

Mediations

Mark Holborn

Susan Meiselas, one of the most influential photographers of our time and an important contributor to the evolution of documentary storytelling, provides an insightful personal commentary on the trajectory of her career in Susan Meiselas: On the Frontline. She guides us through her ideas, practices, and decision-making along her journey--from Carnival Strippers (1976) and Nicaragua: June 1978-July 1979 (1981; reissued by Aperture 2008, 2016) to Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History (1997) and Cova da Moura, Portugal (2004). This book includes over one hundred photographs from her earliest work and most iconic images, along with previously unpublished photographs.

SUSAN MEISELAS ON THE FRONTLIN

Martin van Bruinessen

A. Whitley

Displaying more than four hundred rare color and black-and-white photographs, a visual history of the Kurdish people and their fight for independence and survival in the past century includes the oral accounts and writings of Kurds themselves. 20,000 first printing.

In the Shadow of History

Kurdistan

Un libro clásico contemporáneo, una contribución fundamental a la literatura del fotoperiodismo consciente. Presenta una narrativa extraordinaria de un país en turbulencia. Imágenes que trazan la evolución de la resistencia popular que dio lugar a la insurrección y que culminó con el triunfo de la revolución sandinista en 1979. Reconocido cuando se publicó inicialmente hace más de veinticinco años como un nuevo capítulo en la historia del fotoperiodismo, Nicaragua ha adquirido una dimensión de culto. Este trabajo perdura por muchas razones: es un relato admonitorio sobre las barbaridades de una guerra civil moderna; nos implica en la lucha política represiva de América Latina; expone cómo el color usado con efectividad puede añadir peso emocional al reportaje, y muestra que Meiselas es, realmente, una artista extraordinaria. (Andy Grundberg, 2008). Esta nueva edición se publica en el 30o aniversario de la insurrección popular y del primer viaje de Meiselas a Nicaragua. La edición de 2008 incluye un DVD de la película Imágenes de una revolución, donde Meiselas regresa a los escenarios que fotografió originalmente, busca a las personas y las entrevista sobre la realidad de la Nicaragua posrevolucionaria.

Nicaragua

D Mills

Compiled by Magnum photojournalist Susan Meiselas, Eyes Open is a sourcebook of photography ideas for kids--to engage with the world through the camera. Twenty-three enticing projects help inspire a process of discovery and new ways of telling stories and animating ideas. Eyes Open features photographs by young people from around the globe, as well as work by professional artists that demonstrates how a simple idea can be expanded. Playful and meaningful, this book is for young would-be photographers and those interested in expressing themselves creatively.

Eyes Open: 23 Photography Projects for Curious Kids

Edited by Kristen Lubben. Text by Susan Meiselas, Caroline Brothers, Edmundo Desnoes, Ariel Dorfman, Elizabeth Edwards, David Levi Strauss, Lucy Lippard, Jan-Erik Lundstrom, Allan Sekula.

Susan Meiselas

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