Susan Meiselas
From Provisions
From the Nicaragua Diary
“I felt safe, extending the idea of the familiar, the expected, the ‘I’ve been here before’ feeling. Taking photographs, which are safe to take because everyone has understood their role. I was an American; I had a passport; I was safe. I could travel, trespass, and I could leave. Photography seemed to be a perfect metaphor for this process: I could go from one point to another. Unlike the Nicaraguans, I was free.
“…Do you remember the green picture of the gas bomb? I was outside the university, and the paramilitary was slowly pumping live bullets into the campus. I stood outside, frozen, horrified, unable to go in. Feeling distraught at being behind them, I decided to take the registration numbers of the paramilitary’s cars, and later give them to the students. It wasn’t much, but I was beginning to trespass the bounds of simply being a journalist, an observer.
“…All this accentuated the conflict I felt between, on the one hand, having to work like a professional photojournalist, and on the other, wanting my photographs to be of some use to the Nicaraguans in their struggle. I was always conscious when taking photographs that I was trespassing on someone else’s territory and then leaving again. I always felt the need to establish a dialogue between the photographer and her subject – always trying to give something back of what I had taken.” “…The price of collecting information or news is at the cost of living like a human being. On the other hand, the price of becoming involved is that you may not be seen as a reliable witness.”
--Susan Meiselas, excerpts from Nicaragua diary
About the Artist
"The vintage prints from Nicaragua are enhanced by spectacular color. Some of the street fighters, far from wearing camouflage, have on bright red masks, and the poor people Meiselas follows like to wear bold colors to offset the bleak taupe of the rubble and the florid green of the countryside. In contrast, the Salvador work is traditional black- and-white war photography. The border images are panoramic and wide like the fence... Viewed together, the works span a decade of 'going places where I don't belong,' says Meiselas, who has been rewarded for her bravery and eye with a MacArthur 'genius' grant, Capa Gold Medal and about every other award for valor in photojournalism."
--Shooting the Revolution (exhibition review), Sam Whiting, San Francisco Chronicle, February 1999
"Superficially, her black-and-white photographs of carnival strippers offer a painful look at women (few with fine physiques) who bare all in cheesy, cramped settings. There are the usual male barkers, men counting money and men grabbing at the strippers onstage. But Ms. Meiselas manages a subtle visual sleight of hand when she shows an audience's amazement at a stripper's removing her clothes, quite as though she had done something magical... In this, her first photographic project, Ms. Meiselas's signature artful reporting is very much in evidence. In Lulu and Debbie, Tunbridge, Vt., 1974, a seated woman, cigarette in hand and biting her lower lip, seems a world away from a woman next to her who is drawing aside a dirty curtain and about to show her naked form. In the triangular space between the curtain and the wall is a glimpse of the audience, a young man in the front row looking expectantly at the emerging figure."
--Photography Review: The Erotic as Another Sort of War, Margarett Loke, New York Times, October 1998
More on the Nicaraguan Civil War
Source Watch page on Nicaragua
Teaching Nicaragua a Lesson, Noam Chomsky, from What Uncle Sam Really Wants
"It wasn't just El Salvador that was ignored by the mainstream US media during the 1970s. In the ten years prior to the overthrow of the Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza in 1979, US television -- all networks -- devoted exactly one hour to Nicaragua, and that was entirely on the Managua earthquake of 1972."
Nicaragua 1981-1990 Destabilization in slow motion
"When the American military forces left Nicaragua for the last time, in 1933, they left behind a souvenir by which the Nicaraguan people could remember them: the National Guard, placed under the direction of one Anastasio Somoza ..."
