"The camera is an excuse to be someplace you otherwise don't belong. It gives me both a point of connection and a point of separation." Susan Meisela
(biography from Magnum)
Susan Meiselas' first major photographic essay focused on the lives of women doing striptease at New England country fairs. She photographed the carnivals during three consecutive summers while teaching photography in the New York public schools. Carnival Strippers was published in 1976, and a selection of the images was installed at the Whitney Museum of Art in June 2000.
Meiselas received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College, New York, and her MA in visual education from Harvard University. She joined Magnum Photos in 1976. Best known for her coverage of the insurrection in Nicaragua and for her documentation of human rights issues in Latin America, her second monograph, Nicaragua, June 1978-July 1979, appeared in 1981.
Meiselas edited and contributed to El Salvador: The Work of 30 Photographers and edited Chile from Within, which features work by photographers living under the regime of Augusto Pinochet. She has co-directed two films: Living at Risk: The Story of a Nicaraguan Family (1986) and Pictures from a Revolution (1991) with Richard P. Rogers and Alfred Guzzetti. In 1997 she completed a six-year project curating a 100-year visual history of Kurdistan. Her 2001 monograph, Pandora's Box, which explores a New York S&M club, was followed by Encounters with the Dani, an account of an indigenous people living in Indonesia's Papua highlands.
Meiselas received the Robert Capa Gold Medal for 'outstanding courage and reporting' from the Overseas Press Club for her work in Nicaragua; the Maria Moors Cabot Prize from Columbia University for her coverage of Latin America; and, in 2005, the Cornell Capa Infinity Award. In 1992 she was named a MacArthur Fellow.
