Susan Meiselas

Susan Meiselas is a documentary photographer based in New York. She is the author of Carnival Strippers (1976), Nicaragua (1981), Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History (1997), Pandora’s Box (2001), Encounters with the Dani (2003) Prince Street Girls (2016), A Room Of Their Own (2017), Tar Beach (2020), and Carnival Strippers Revisited (2022).

Meiselas is well known for her documentation of human rights issues in Latin America. Her photographs are included in North American and international collections. In 1992 she was made a MacArthur Fellow, received a Guggenheim Fellowship (2015), and most recently the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize (2019) and the first Women in Motion Award from Kering and the Rencontres d’Arles. Mediations, a survey exhibition of her work from the 1970s to the present was recently exhibited at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Jeu de Paume, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Instituto Moreira Salles in São Paulo, Kunst Haus Wien, C/O Berlin, Kunstmuseum Magdeburg, and FOMU in Antwerp.

She has been the President of the Magnum Foundation since 2007, with a mission to expand diversity and creativity in documentary photography.

A Room of Their Own :

I was invited by Multistory to photograph in the region of the Black Country, a multi-ethnic, post-industrial region in the West Midlands, UK. The moment I entered a woman’s refuge there, I felt connected to its mission.

We developed a collaborative project with the women who were willing to share their stories. We agreed that there would be no visual identification of the people or locations within the refuge shelter network. Some photographs have been redacted, pixelated or blurred for further protection.

This book follows the stages of the refuge experience from the time it begins in ‘a room of their own’. An empty room may offer the launch of a new life, but it can also represent resistance to the idea of settling, and speak to the desire to move on.

(Source : Artist’s Website, Susan Meiselas)

“Domestic violence, flight, refuge – these are not the conditions that fit the event of family photography or its afterlife. Indeed, ‘A Room of Their Own’ shows family and family life to be the very sites of violence that these women had to flee, sites we see so clearly reflected in ‘Archives of Abuse.’ But while these latter are compiled by the police, Meiselas focuses on the women themselves, showing us how they construct their own shelter, outside the times and spaces of a threatening domesticity.  While police photographers shine the flashlight on bloodied sheets and injured faces, Meiselas makes sure not to intrude, protecting her subjects even from her own camera gaze. And she protects them from the familial gaze that positions them as subjects of familial violence.”

(Source : Artist’s website, Marianne Hirsch)