In the spring of 1975, Susan Meiselas bicycle through little Italy in New York when a sudden flash of light forced him to brake. A gang of girls, aged 10, stood on Prince Street holding a mirror, trying to dazzle passers -by. Some people may have called the cops, but Meiselas went to say hello. Then, charmed and slightly intimidated by their Chutzpah, she caught her camera. It has become a kind of game. “They would see me and shout, take a photo, took a photo,” she recalls. “Whenever I headed for the market in the street.”
Prince Street GirlsAs Meiselas appointed the project, was radically different from a large part of street photography in New York at the time. Instead of confronting or around an ambush to his subjects, Meiselas sought to gain the confidence of the girls while they dragged on the block, chewed chewing gum, set, Gof. The discreetly observational black and white frames that they have produced are almost shocking in their lack of artifice – a precious distillation of the life of these girls while they take first communion, then mutate in Gawky adolescents, experience smoking and the angle for the attention of boys. Often, they hardly seem to be aware that the camera is even there.
In a way, said Meiselas, this was not the case: his Leica became part of the furniture. “I was a stranger to them, but they invited me,” she added, in front of a selection of the series installed in Somerset House in London.
The London Show, which marks the Meiselas honored by the Sony World Photography Awards, is the first time that the Prince Street series and several others have been exhibited in the United Kingdom. It is also an opportunity to think about an extraordinary and multi-brin career. Meiselas could be best known for its conflict photographs in Nicaragua and Salvador, and to be a light from the famous Magnum photo agency. But the beating heart of his work is undoubtedly the most intimate projects, often focusing on female experience: the explorations of the life of adolescent girls and soldiers in basic training, sex workers and survivors of domestic violence. Many are exhibited in London.
Although the images are remarkably varied, Meiselas seems to launch the same generous eye on everyone and everything she meets, supports Fiona Rogers, a V&A photography curator. “Susan does not only take photos – she listens, collaborates and remembers.”
Born in Baltimore in 1948, she found photography almost by accident, while she was studying visual education in Harvard in the early 1970s. One day she received a large 4×5 view camera and said he found something to point it. She ended up making portraits of residents of the pension in which she lived and inviting them to comment on the results, which she printed alongside, in a taste of collaborations that she would try later (“I do not think that the photo of me really gives the essence of me”, we read on). In five years, remarkably, she was a member of Magnum.
The project that earned him this distinction, Carnival Strippersis also visible to Somerset House. As Prince Street GirlsIt started with a fortuitous meeting. In the summer of 1971, Meiselas and her partner fell on an agricultural fair in New England and noticed that, alongside the rides and the largest tomato competition, there was an act of itinerant strip. Women in lingerie and few others would not parade on a “ballly box” of fortune at the front, trying to drum the custom at the sight of anyone passing. From time to time, men passed through the curtain to live the adult spectacle inside.
Meiselas was surprised, but immediately forced. “I had to understand something of what I observed, which was the intensity of these meetings,” she said. “It was the male look, that's what I looked at.”
It was not easy to have access, especially as a photographer – “” no ladies, no babies “, that's what they would say,” she recalls dry – but once she was, she found something unexpected: a story of solidarity and survival. She returned the following year, then two more summers, slowly establishing relations with women who danced. Again, she would print contact sheets and invite her subjects to choose their favorite photos. She also recorded interviews, encouraging them to speak for themselves.
“Many of them came from small towns, creating an independent means of subsistence. Some had escaped the men with whom they were married or abusive relations. And yet they were judged for what they did.”
There are a lot of male looks on the photographs printed by Meiselas – she often crouching hidden behind the scene, looking in the loring crowd – but the same goes for tenderness and humor of the world. An image, taken in a locker room in Fryeburg, in Maine in 1975, represents a group of women playing bare cards, completely unconscious. Another, who has rightly become famous, shows a woman of whom she has become particularly close, Lena, standing in her underwear under the spotlights, sculptular and heroic, surrounded by abassived men.
To the eye of another photographer – perhaps a man – it could be an image of the exploitation. But Meiselas saw something more nuanced. “I had such respect for that, physical and emotional work,” she says. “I certainly did not have the courage to do what they did.” She laughs. “I mean, I tried it once.”
What, undress and play? “Yeah. I felt that if I was trying to understand what it was to go there, I had to do it. I lasted a few seconds. It was terrifying.”
There would be no doubt about the courage or the tenacity of Meiselas. During the civil war in Nicaragua, where she traveled shortly after, she learned the Spanish of the street and produced a surprisingly soft meditative work, this time in color. She ended up establishing relations with the people she had photographed and returned year after year – the antithesis of war photography at leak.
A trip to the north of Iraq, where she traveled to document the mass pits after the First Gulf War in 1991, led to a deep meeting with the Kurds. Again, she spent years on the project – locking archives, assembling documents, intimate and working by local photographers, trying to discover the visual history of a persecuted people. He finally became a website and a book.
She is still in contact with Prince Street's girls, it turns out that; They are now in Staten Island and New Jersey and grandmothers. She has not done her portraits for some time, in part because she no longer feels the need: they have smartphones and remove a lot of their. “It reminds me: I have to send them a message, tell them that they are here in London!” she said suddenly.
The term “co -creation” has become fashionable in photography – generally codified as an attempt to adjust the balance of power between the artist and the subject, producing something more collaborative – but what is striking is that it has been doing this kind of thing for decades, I say. “People are always very concerned about the question of being from the outside compared to the interior,” she replies. “I think these are artificial questions, in some respects. You resolve it by finding a reason to be there. ”
At Magnum, she defended the work of women and tried to end the agency's reputation to be a photo of a photojournalist boy. There were challenges: in 2021, the agency experienced a #MeToo moment after a Magnum member, David Alan Harvey, was forced to resign after being accused of inappropriate behavior with young photographers. “It was a calculation for us,” she said. “I think we managed it professionally, but it was very painful.”
The photographic world is infinitely more plural than it was, underlines Meiselas. “It is constantly changing. I was the youngest of women photographers when I entered Magnum, and now I'm the oldest. We always go forward. ”
Now at the end of the 1970s, she claims not to have an appetite for new projects. But it is occupied by the Magnum Foundation, the agency's non -profit arm, and when we speak is back by seeing a presentation of one of its Kurdistan pieces in Vienna. Earlier this year, she was in Texas to supervise an installation of a project exploring border passages, partly based on her central America work. “With Trump, the idea is as relevant now as it was at that time,” she said darkly.
I am interested in what she feels about the changing state of photojournalism, especially in an era of smartphones and images generated by AI. Is there still a role in reporting? “It is much more difficult to feel the need to document as I think many of us have done,” she says. “There are so much more eyes on the world.”
But that has always been the challenge for photographers, she adds. “Why am I in a particular place?” What am I really contributing? ”
When I emphasize that her contribution fills the walls around us, she folds her nose. “It's wonderful, of course, but the price of my photographs or the relationship with the communities of which I am a part?” Maybe both, I venture; It is difficult to separate both. “Ok, very well,” she says. “But I don't think it's at all of me.”
Susan Meiselas is the recipient of the exceptional contribution in 2025 to photography, Sony World Photography Awards; Exhibition at Somerset House, London, April 17-May 5, worldphoto.org. The fourth edition of “Susan Meiselas: Nicaragua” is published by Aperture
