Susan Meiselas

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.[6][7] She received honorary Doctorates in Fine Arts from the Parsons School in 1986 and The Art Institute of Boston in 1996.[8]

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.[9] 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.[10] 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.[11]

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.[12]

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. It 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.[13][14] 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.[15] 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."[16]

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.[17]

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.[18]

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.[1][19] 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).

• Living at Risk: The Story of a Nicaraguan Family (1986) – co-directed by Meiselas
• Pictures from a Revolution (1991) – co-directed with Alfred Guzzetti and Richard P. Rogers
• Roses in December (1982)- features Meiselas’ stills of the churchwomen's gravesite.

• Wilkinson, Paul (1982), Why Nicaragua?, which includes a review of Nicaragua, June 1978 - July 1979, in Hearn, Sheila G. (ed.), Cencrastus No. 10, Autumn 1982, pp. 45 & 46, ISSN 0264-0856

• 1978: Robert Capa Gold Medal for "outstanding courage and reporting" by the Overseas Press Club for her work in Nicaragua[20]
• 1982: American Society of Media Photographers Photojournalist of the Year
• 1982: Leica Award for Excellence[21]
• 1985: Engelhard Award from the Institute of Contemporary Art[22]
• 1992: MacArthur Fellowship, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation[2]
• 1994: Maria Moors Cabot Prize from Columbia University for her coverage of Latin America[23]
• 1994: Missouri Honor Medal for Distinguished Service in Journalism[24]
• 1994: Hasselblad Award[25]
• 1999: Nederlands Foto Instituut Grant, "Photoworks-in-Progress: Constructing Identity"
• 2005: Infinity Award: Cornell Capa Award, International Center of Photography, New York City[26]
• 2006: Royal Photographic Society's Centenary Medal and Honorary Fellowship (HonFRPS)[3]
• 2011: Harvard Arts Medal, Arts First, Harvard University[27]
• 2015: Guggenheim Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation[28]
• 2019: Winner, Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize for her retrospective exhibition, Mediations, at Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris.[29]

Meiselas' work is held in the following permanent collections:

• Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois[30]
• Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama[31]
• Fogg Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts[32]
• George Eastman House, Rochester, NY[33]
• Jewish Museum, New York City[34]
• Library of Congress, Washington DC[35]
• Magnum Photos Collection at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin[36]
• Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL[37]
• Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas[38]
• Museum of Modern Art, New York[12]
• Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO[39]
• San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California[40]
• Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City[41]

• Susan Meiselas. Mediations, Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, 2017;[42] Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris, February–May 2018.[43][44][45] A retrospective.
• Close Enough: New Perspectives from 12 Women Photographers of Magnum. September 29, 2022-January 9, 2023, International Center of Photography, New York, New York [46]

• Amanpour, Christiane (1999). Magna brava : Eve Arnold, Martine Franck, Susan Meiselas, Inge Morath, Marilyn Silverstone. Munich: Prestel. p. 240. ISBN 3791321609.
• Golden, Reuel (2011). Photojournalism : 150 years of outstanding press photography ([New ed.] ed.). London: Carlton. p. 256. ISBN 9781847326362.

• Official website
• Profile at Magnum Photos
• aka Kurdistan
• Expanding the Circle: The Engaged Photographer multimedia piece Archived May 22, 2012, at the Wayback Machine
• Susan Meiselas: Carnival Strippers (video)