Well-Travelled Photographer, Recording and then Returning
by Caroline Brothers
(published in The New York Times, 11 August 2008)
Richard Harbus for The International Herald Tribune Susan Meiselas in front of some of her photographs.
ARLES, France — Susan Meiselas is looking a bit shaken. She has just heard that her trip to Guinea, scheduled to start the next day, has been canceled; her driver there has been assaulted and is fleeing the country. She is working with
Human Rights Watch photographing child domestic workers, and clearly someone didn’t like it.
Susan Meiselas/Magnum Photos
A widow at a mass grave in Iraqi Kurdistan; Ms. Meiselas devoted an extensive project to the Kurds and their history.
Her assignment was meant as a sequel to her photographs of Indonesian maids in Singapore last year. “It’s a strange thing to have your knapsack filled with film and cameras and be stopped on track,” she said.
She was in this southern French city to help commemorate the 60th anniversary of Magnum, the photographers’ agency she joined at 26. Some of her work, which covers a range that includes war in Nicaragua and sadomasochism in New York, is on display alongside that of her Magnum colleagues at the city’s annual photographic festival, Les Rencontres d’Arles.
One of just 6 women among 52 active photographers at the agency, which was founded by Robert Capa, George Rodger, David Seymour and Henri Cartier-Bresson, Ms. Meiselas is known for her searing photographs of conflict.
She is also constantly questioning what photography can do as the technological and economic landscape that surrounds it radically shifts.
Ms. Meiselas’s work was spotted by the Magnum photographer Gilles Peress in 1976. She had just completed her first in-depth project — black-and-white shots of carnival strippers in New England — and taken the pictures to Harper’s magazine.
It declined to publish them but assigned her to photograph women at the Democratic National Convention. Mr. Peress, whom Ms. Meiselas met on that job, took her portfolio to Magnum, which invited her to join the same year.
Magnum at that time, she said, was “a very potent place” where photographers were being dispatched to faraway assignments. Being exposed to that gave her a new sense of her own possibilities as a photographer.
“Before Magnum, I’m not sure I would have imagined myself going places I didn’t belong,” she said. Shortly afterward, she headed for Nicaragua and El Salvador, whose civil wars were to absorb her for more than a decade.
“I was hard-core; it was hard to get me to leave that region,” she said during a speech at the World Press Photo awards in Amsterdam in April. “I didn’t go to Peru or Haiti or South Africa, I just stayed in El Salvador.”
They were formative years in several ways: remaining in one place over a long period made her conscious of the narrative structure of time, and in Nicaragua a sense of what she would try to do throughout her career as a photographer crystallized.
“Staying in Nicaragua, I started to see pictures in the present as they would be perceived in the future as the past,” she said. “That was an incredibly powerful and important recognition for me. People were making history.”
While a reporter can hear about and compress elements of an evolving situation into an article, the challenge for Ms. Meiselas was to become attuned to those fine shifts so as to capture them on film. But doing so also raised some hard issues and conferred a feeling of powerlessness with which she still seems to be grappling.
“Part of what happens if you stay and take pictures is that you feel you will protect people just by standing there,” she said. “But you can’t stand there that long, and you can’t protect them.”
Taking photographs, she once said in an interview with Nicaraguan television, “is sometimes the least you can do.”
Much of what drives Ms. Meiselas’s work is a desire to step back through the looking glass to find the people she once photographed, to forge connections and return their pictures to them.
“We take pictures away and we don’t bring them back,” she said. “That became a central quest for me — relinking, revisiting, the repatriation of work: it’s become a kind of motif in my thinking.”
The notion of moving in circles is now central to her work, but in a way, she has long been doing it. She laments the demise of the Polaroid camera because it allowed her to give a photograph, on the spot, to people who did not have cameras of their own.
In a project involving the Kurds, she sought to restore a collective memory to a dispossessed people, spending several years searching for photographs that were scanned into an online archive of Kurdish history, “akaKurdistan” (akakurdistan.com).
Grappling with memories: that was her goal when she returned to Nicaragua in 2004 for the 25th anniversary of the Sandinista revolution. She took mural-size prints of some of her pictures and displayed them in the places where the shots had originally been taken.
Her war photograph of a mauled body — showing just a backbone in a pair of jeans — was returned to a lonely hillside and erected there as a kind of memorial. Another work, which depicts graffiti scribbled on a pink wall, asking, “Where is Norman Gonzales: the government has to answer,” reaches beyond Nicaragua to recall all of Latin America’s disappeared.
Ms. Meiselas of course has regrets: assignments that didn’t materialize; not making it to Bosnia or Somalia. “Doors open, and doors close, and they are not revolving ones always,” she said.
Still, she has not shied from taking risks. Barred entry to the carnival strippers’ tents, Ms. Meiselas befriended the strippers themselves until they invited her in; she was eventually persuaded to get up onstage in a raincoat and try it herself. “I couldn’t handle it,” she said.
Years later she pushed herself to photograph Pandora’s Box, a sadomasochism club in New York. “It was the absolute edge of voyeurism,” she said. “I had to get right to that edge.”
For her it was as much about violence as voyeurism; it recalled the interrogation cells of the wars she had covered, and the voluntary infliction of pain gave her nightmares.
“To be in a small room with two people with an agreement that one of them imposes violence on the other — it was so surprising how many people seek pain, who like to give it and get it, and I had to confront that,” she said. “I want to understand it. I need to be there to know.”
An exhibition featuring her Pandora’s Box photographs is at the Cohen Amador Gallery in Manhattan through Sept. 8.
Ms. Meiselas’s attempts to step back into the pictures she took decades ago seem not just a way of giving fragments of history back to its protagonists, but also something more personal: a way of understanding her own place in time.
“I come out of a documentary tradition,” she said. “We all cross history, and whichever ones we cross shape us as we shape them.”
She cannot yet say whether her photographs of domestic workers for Human Rights Watch will develop into another obsession.
“They are very vulnerable, they are just very vulnerable,” she said of the girls, some as young as 7, co-opted from Asia and Africa into the worldwide economy of caretaking. “It’s a sort of migration, and the thing that’s startling is that they are not getting any education.”
You have the feeling that she is standing there with her camera anyway, trying to protect them.
“Magnum Photos” is at the Magasin Électrique, S.N.C.F. rail yards, Arles, France, through Sept. 16. Susan Meiselas’s photographs of Indonesian domestic workers can be viewed at Magnum in Motion, at magnumphotos.com. “Susan Meiselas: Pandora’s Box” is at the Cohen Amador Gallery, 41 East 57th Street, Manhattan, through Sept. 8; (212) 759-6740.
