Juergen Teller - Fashion shoot in W Magazine
Well-Travelled Photographer, Recording and then ReturningSusan Meiselas in front of some of her photographs.
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.
The Girl in the Window
Image by Robert Altman
The exhibition brings together 60 of the most powerful images from Altman’s extensive portfolio. As one of the lead Rolling Stone photographers in the magazine’s heyday of the late sixties and early seventies, Altman’s exquisitely candid shots capture the luminaries of every sphere of influence – from politics and music through to the everyday revolutionaries and children of free love – and creates an extraordinary photographic journey through the historic moments of political; social and cultural revolution that have come to define ‘The Sixties’.
Frozen in Time: The Mountain Photography of Vittorio Sella runs from 25 June to 14 September 2008
Fashion in the Mirror Self Reflection in Fashion
The secret diary of Mario Testino: What the world's most glamorous photographer saw
On the Shoulders of Giants is the Museum’s first exhibition dedicated solely to photography, and acts as a unique visual record of the modern University of Cambridge.
The exhibition is accompanied by a special publication which will be available from the Museum’s Courtyard Shop, a virtual exhibition and a podcast.
For more details and the podcast click here.
Mr Graham Appleby by Howard Guest
“Looks like the picture won’t be finished on time,” the letter explains. “It rains every day and we can’t find 2 midgets, so it looks like I’ll be here at least 2 more weeks.”
The letters, along with 210 vintage black-and-white photographic prints, were found in 2003 in a zebra-stripe trunk that was bought at a yard sale in Kentucky by two Indiana women who were on their way back from a camping trip. One of the women simply liked the look of the trunk, and when she found old clothes, yellowed papers and pictures inside, she thought about throwing the contents away.
But she took them instead to an Indianapolis rare-documents dealer. And this week the Indianapolis Museum of Art plans to announce that it has acquired a trove of work and correspondence by Weegee, the crepuscular, stogie-smoking New York photographer whose visceral pictures became a template not only for artists like Diane Arbus but also for much of the uncomfortably close tabloid imagery that exists today. The museum described the acquisition as a partial gift and partial purchase from the dealer.
The trunk is assumed to have once been the possession of Wilma Wilcox, a social worker who was Weegee’s companion and lived with him from 1957 until his death in 1968. Upon her death in 1993, she bequeathed the bulk of his work — thousands of prints and negatives — to the International Center of Photography in Manhattan. How the trunk full of prints and 62 letters to Ms. Wilcox from Weegee (born Usher Fellig in what is now Ukraine, and later known as Arthur Fellig) ended up in Kentucky is a mystery that neither the Indianapolis Museum nor the dealer, Steve H. Nowlin, has solved.
“We’re just lucky that it all survived,” said Martin Krause, the museum’s curator of prints, drawings and photographs. “The woman who found them thought maybe these were just old family snapshots or something — though how you could mistake a Weegee for a family photograph, I don’t know.”
The size of the newly discovered collection pales in comparison with the holdings of the International Center of Photography, and Mr. Krause said that no previously unknown work had been found among the prints. But for a museum that began collecting photography seriously only 15 years ago, the work is an important addition — especially because the trunk contained a surprisingly broad survey of Weegee’s career, with the only weak spot being fewer prints from his early years of crime and murder-scene coverage in the 1930s.
Maxwell Anderson, the museum’s director, said the institution’s young collection has notable 19th-century work and a concentration of contemporary photography. “So this will serve as a great bridge between those traditions,” he said, adding, of the discovery of the prints and letters, that it was “like the last keystroke of a life of accidental purpose.”
Weegee — whose nickname, according to one story he told, was a transliteration of Ouija, a reference to his almost psychic ability to find a fresh crime scene — was the archetype of a tabloid photographer, working mostly at night in the lower-rent parts of New York City.
“People who work in the daytime are suckers,” he once said. Before the publication of his first book, “Naked City,” made him famous in 1945, he lived in a cheap room near police headquarters and was said to be so accustomed to working on the run that he once developed a picture of a prizefight in a subway motorman’s cab while rushing back to a newspaper office.
As his star rose in the 1950s and 1960s, he began to travel extensively, make experimental films and worked for other directors, some as illustrious as Stanley Kubrick, for whom he served as a consultant during the filming of “Dr. Strangelove.”
But as many of the newly discovered letters to Ms. Wilcox show, much of his film career was on a lower plane. The letter from Munich refers to his work on a 1958 quasi-documentary called “Windjammer,” the story of an epic sea journey filmed in something called Cinemiracle, a short-lived widescreen format. (In fact, very short-lived: “Windjammer” was the only movie to be shot with that method.) Given Weegee’s influence on Arbus, Andy Warhol and even contemporary photographers, Mr. Krause said the museum was extremely lucky to come into such a body of work all at once. But he added that the heavily flashed, high-contrast pictures — of corpses, movie-house lovers, jazz clubs, celebrities, bums and oddball street scenes — were also simply as entertaining as the man who took them.
“This gives our collection a certain personality,” he said. “And what a personality to get.”
Photography Symposium Dramatic Reality:On April 25th 2008 the National Media Museum presented a day of talks from photographers and photography scholars exploring how global events and concerns are accurately documented in an age of increasing globalisation, centralisation and commercialism.
To listen to the podcasts click here.
Street & Studio is a magnificent exhibition of international photography. It presents a fascinating history of photographic portraiture taken on the street or in the photographer’s studio, looking at the differences between these two key locations in which photographers work.
Over 350 striking works are gathered in this stylish exhibition, by some of the world’s most famous and important photographers including Francis Alÿs, Diane Arbus, Cecil Beaton, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Rineke Dijkstra, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Robert Mapplethorpe, Irving Penn, Norman Parkinson, August Sander, Cindy Sherman, Malick Sidibé, Paul Strand, James Van der Zee, Juergen Teller and Wolfgang Tillmans. Focusing on photos taken in buzzing cities, with their cosmopolitan cast of hipsters, businessmen, beauties and criminals, Street & Studio builds an engrossing urban history of photography, ranging from early black-and-white pictures from the late 1800s, to elegant fashion photography from the mid twentieth century, to cutting-edge portraiture by contemporary artists.
