Susan Meiselas

(American, b. 1948)

Fleeing the Bomb to Seek Refuge Outside of Esteli from the book Nicaragua, 1981

Directly political and fiercely concerned with a revolution counter to American foreign policies of the day, Susan Meiselas’s documentation of the atrocities and tragedies of daily life in the midst of political turbulence belong to a fervent branch of concerned photojournalism. Meiselas spent a year documenting the 1978-79 Sandanistan revolution in Nicaragua from a point of view decidedly sympathetic to the rebel forces. This image of a woman fleeing with a naked baby in tow is tragic, but not nearly as visceral as much of Meiselas’s documentation of violence and torture from the same series. Meiselas operates under the photojournalistic principle of photographer as public conscience and of the photograph as evidence of realities that most people would rather ignore.

Born in 1948 in Baltimore, Susan Meiselas grew up on Long Island. She received a BA from Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, New York (1970) and an EdM from Harvard University School of Education (1971). A member of Magnum Photos, Meiselas has received many grants and awards, including the Hasselblad Foundation Prize, the Robert Capa Gold Medal for Outstanding Reportage, and fellowships from The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and The National Endowment for the Arts. Her photographs have been exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago; Camerawork, London; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the International Museum of Photography, George Eastman House, Rochester, New York; and the Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego, among others.

Errázuriz, Paz.; Parra, Marco Antonio de la., et al. Chile from Within, 1973-1988. New York: W.W. Norton, 1990.

Forché, Carolyn.; Mattison, Harry., et al. El Salvador: Work of Thirty Photographers. New York: Writers and Readers Pub. Cooperative: Distributed in the U.S.A. by W.W. Norton, 1983.

Johnson, James.; Meiselas, Susan. Susan Meiselas (videorecording). Boulder, Colo.: University of Colorado, Academic Media Services, 1992.

Meiselas, Susan. Carnival Strippers. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976.

Meiselas, Susan. Encounters with the Dani: Stories from the Baliem Valley. New York: Göttingen, Germany: International Center of Photography; Steidl, 2003.

Meiselas, Susan. Learn to See. Cambridge, MA: Polaroid Foundation, 1970.

Meiselas, Susan. Pandora’s Box, NYC. [London]: Trebruk, 2001.

Meiselas, Susan, and Martin van Bruinessen. Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History. New York: Random House, 1997.

Meiselas, Susan, and Claire Rosenberg. Nicaragua, June 1978-July 1979. New York: Pantheon, 1981.

Rogers, Richard P, and Alfred Guzzetti. Pictures from a Revolution (videorecording). New York, NY: Kino Video, 1991.