Susan Meiselas

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.
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 shortly before his death in 2001.
Education.
Meiselas was born 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. She received honorary Doctorates in Fine Arts from the Parsons School in 1986 and The Art Institute of Boston in 1996.
Career.
After earning her degree from Harvard, 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. 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. 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.
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.
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. The 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. 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. 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."
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.
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 made in collaboration with Multistory, a local community arts charity, which published a book of the work, "A Room of Their Own" (2017).
Collections.
Meiselas' work is held in the following permanent collections: