American Photographic Journalist Susan Meiselas' Art - Essay Example

Susan Meiselas American photographer and photographic journalist Susan Meiselas was born in Baltimore in 1948. Educated in New York she laterobtained a Batchelor of Arts at Sarah Lawrence College and then became a master of arts in visual education with Harvard Universityin 1970. In the same year she began working as an assistant film editor on a documentary ‘Basic Training.’ From 1972 to 1974 she ran photography workshops for both teachers and children in New York. She was a consultant to the New York Public School System, designing and introducing a photographic curriculum for students in to 4th to 6th grades. The Maryland Art Source web page dedicated to Meiselas tells how she was given grants in order to begin film and photography programs in the school houses of the rural south. Later she was able to combine her teaching ideas with oral history and photography and she continued to work with teachers in New York city at the Center for Understanding Media. In 1976 she joined the Magnum Photos co-operative. The members portray and interpret world events , issues and people.Since that time Meiselas worked as a freelance photographer. She is best known for her pictures of human cruelty and coverage of human rights issues in Latin America, travelling in 1977 to Nicaragua to photograph the civil war then being conducted, with huge loss of life, between the forces of the dictator General Anastasio Somoza Garcías and his Sandinista opposition. In 1981, she photographed a village in San Salvador which had been destroyed by the armed forces and also took photographs of the El Mozote massacre which took place in the same year when Salvadorean soldiers , who had been trained by the military of the United States, killed some 1000 civilians in the name of an anti-guerilla campaign. Her work is known world wide Meiselas has had many one-woman exhibitions in Paris, Madrid, Amsterdam, London, Los Angeles, Chicago and New York. Her photographs are included in more permanent exhibitions both in America and elsewhere. She has been honored with many awards in recognition of both her work and her courage including the Robert Capa Gold Medal for outstanding courage and reporting in 1979 given by the Overseas Press Club for her work in Nicaragua. This was followed by the Leica Award for Excellence in 1982, the Engelhard Award from the Institute of Contemporary Art in 1985. In 1992 she was named as a MacArthur Fellow. The Maria Moors Cabot Prize was given by Columbia University for her coverage of Latin America and she also received the Hasselblad Foundation Photography prize, both in 1994. Most recently she received the Cornell Capa Infinity Award in 2005.. In 1992, she was named a MacArthur Fellow. On her website she says ‘I love photography. It is my point of engagement. It is where it all begins, but not where it ends.’ She describes how she is also fascinated by the things that are outside the frame, outside that fixed moment. She tells how she sometimes works with text, with other peoples work and with sounds in order to create as she explores social history, something she says is ‘Not an easy task’. Her work has not always been appreciated . Ken Johnson o f the New York Times is quoted on the web page ‘In history – Susan Meiselas’ as saying her work is both exploitive and opportunistic as after all she does make a living and a world wide reputation from other people’s difficulties and suffering. But she doesn’t create those situations. She merely reports them, exposing the plight of various people to a wider audience and claims that she does not understand the accusation that making documentaries is exploitive in any way. Nicaragua 1981 This picture comes from Nicaragua and is displayed on home page of Susan Meiselas alongside other photographs. These include a monochrome of a carnival stripper, an image from Kurdistan of someone holding a recently excavated skull, and a picture which is mostly made up of the figures of the warlike Dani people who come from the Indonesian province of Papua. Apart from the devastation that the photograph shows, it also reveals a wonderful balance and composition, in terms of light and dark, the jagged points against the almost white sky, the perfect centrality of the girl in her bright clothing, rake thin and looking old before her time, staring out of the picture at we know not what further tragedy, against a more or less neutral background only relieved by the blue clothing of her fellow Nicaraguans and a small table stuck at an unlikely angle It seems almost posed because of its perfect balance. One wonders whether on this occasion the photographer took many, many pictures of the same place and this was considered the best, or whether she walked around the site until she saw the perfect composition and then captured it. The main lines in this picture slope out of vision to right and left. The observer is left in no doubt that there is even more to see on either side. The picture of course portrays devastation. This was the aftermath of an attack by the countries own armed forces, genocide and destruction as described above. These were the homes of very ordinary people, perhaps completely blameless of the guerrilla action which was the reason given for such a devastating and total destruction of both property and life. These were not the homes of the rich as can be seen from the remains of the building materials – corrregated iron, breeze blocks, low ceilings and thin walls. There is more than devastation here. We don’t know if the four people in the picture had actually lived in these houses, but they are searching for what they can find in order to rebuild their lives. The girl seems to be holding cooking pots that she has rescued from the rubble.. In the midst of sorrow and anger people still need to be fed. She is a provider. This is her priority and perhaps her way of coping – doing something she is skilled at and familiar with. Like all photographs this one captures only a moment in time. In an hour or two, perhaps even in a moment or two these people will be doing something different. Never again will they be in exactly these positions, doing what they are doing and thinking what they are thinking at this moment. Did they welcome or resent the presence of a photographer? - Did they care one way or the other? Perhaps they were so involved in their own situation that they did not even notice her. Miss Meiselas has described taking pictures as her point of engagement, but in this case she appears very much the uninvolved, if not disinterested, observer. At a 2008 exhibition of her work she described how she had chosen to display this and other pictures from the same expedition:- With the photographs from Nicaragua the idea was to immerse the audience, somehow mimicking what it felt like for me to enter a world that suddenly unravelled…and the intensity of that. Another element of the installation is that the photographs are placed so that you almost have to weave through them – you’re inside them as it were. Human coping skills and endurance are portrayed. These people are in a terrible situation, one they will never forget, but they are already putting things back together, making the every first beginnings of a new life. There is an evocation of pictures after the blitz of London with life carrying on, whatever had happened the night before. Many people who saw the picture would perhaps otherwise have been unaware of the situation in Nicaragua, not even being sure exactly where it was, but pictures like this arouse reaction, and may in some part lead to positive action and help for those involved. The circulation of photographs such as this was what prompted a United States congressional investigation into El Salvador and its extreme right-wing death squads as well as the role America was taking in the war there. 10 years later in 1991 Miss Meiselas returned to the country in an attempt to track down the people in her original photographs. The result is her DVD ‘Pictures from a Revolution’ described as a :- provocative look at the revolution, its aftermath, and the individuals who fought in the insurrection and now live in the wake of political turmoil and dashed hopes. She has said of her work in Latin America:- While working in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Central America, I was very driven with the idea that, I’m seeing something now. Will it ever be quite like this again? So the energy of my eye was focused in a particular way, because things were so critical and unpredictable." In an interview with Guy Lane of Paris Photo in November 2008 Meiselas describes why she went back to Nicaragua saying that she wanted to know what had taken place over the previous ten years. And describes the film she made as an attempt to make sense of the situation came out of wanting to know what had happened between my visits over a ten year period, a time that had been challenging, difficult, painful and unpredictable for those involved. She felt that the film produced opened up a response to her own questions about what photographs meant or could continue to mean for those portrayed as well as those whose memories of events had been shaped by them. She says that the great surprise about making the film ‘Pictures from a Revolution’ was that she had no idea of what had happened to any of the people she had met and photographed or how they now felt about the acts of which they had been part 10 years earlier. Other work With this as with other work her aim is to give these people a voice in the wider world as she would later do with the Kurds. She shows what few others do. With the Kurds for instance, there were lots of photographers showing them fleeing from northern Iraq during the Gulf Wars. Susan instead concentrated on the places from which they had come as she explains in her statement on the Threads of the Woven web page where she also says, despite he r wide experience of conflict and human suffering, that she had never before experienced such a systematic destruction of people’s village lives. Unusually she was part of a legal team building a case against Saddam Hussein as they excavated and photographed the murdered bodies of those who would never flee. So much for the claim that she exploits those she pictures. Susan describes in her statement how she became interested not jus tin the Kurdish people, but also with those who had interacted with them over time, in particular the photographers who had carried images out of the country to show elsewhere and how these interactions had played their part in fashioning Kurdish life, but also that of those who met them. She points out that the Kurdish people live an insecure life and so don’t have much in the way of libraries of collections. Their history is better documented in the west, with images taken out of their lands, than it is in Kurdistan. Her book ‘akaKurdistan,’ is subtitled, ‘A place for collective memory and cultural exchange’ and contains a mixture of photography and many Excerpts from diaries and other documents, making public what was at one time a personal record or a private exchange between individuals. It has been designed so as to suggest the randomness by which history gets put together, containing as it does newspaper clippings and selected memoirs, revealing both what was presented by the press and what ordinary people believed at the time. Conclusion Susan Meiselas has been and continues to be is an exceptional photographer with great technical and artistic skills. It is obvious too that she really cares about the people involved in her pictures and the situations, often not of their own making, in which they find themselves, whether they be fairground girls with whom she spent several years , the would be revolutionaries, or remote tribesmen. She cares too about the ways in which the resulting pictures are displayed as is obvious from the text of the interview mentioned earlier, describing for instance how her pictures of the strippers would be shown alongside sound – the voices of the girls and their managers – in order to better evoke the true nature of their situation. She describes the installation as ‘quite intimate and tucked away’ because so often these strip shows would be tucked away in a small corner of a carnival. Originally these pieces were part of a book, three years in the making, in which the images were accompanied by dialogue – that of the girls themselves, but also their boyfriends, their work colleagues and even the customers who came to watch. This is more than mere photography, even at its highest level technically and artistically. The idea is, that as far as is possible, the viewer enters into the world of the people portrayed. Meiselas has an obvious determination to contextualize her works, thus helping audiences to see what she sees - the reasoning behind taking that particular picture in order to show people in a particular situation. She doesn’t always use frames for instance, and has even displayed work in Xerox form just pinned up on a wall, a method that brings a sense of immediacy to a display. This is because she feels people have to realise that there is so much more happening outside the picture they see. A frame contains the energy within a picture, but Meiselas wants people to realise that there is much more to see and know. That is why she feels that on many occasions her work is best viewed in book form, image after image. This is perhaps in contrast to some of her fellow creative photographers who would feel perhaps that each image has to stand alone. She is more concerned about the value of a photograph for the stories of which it is part. This point of view reveals an almost insecurity about her work and is perhaps what makes it unique. Works Cited Electronic Sources In history – Susan Meiselas, FOTO8, International Center of Photography , New York, interview, 23rd November 2008, 26th November 2009 http://www.foto8.com/home/content/view/711/190/ Meiselas, S., akaKurdistan, 1998, 26th November 2009, http://www.universes-in-universe.de/woven-maze/meiselas/index.html Meiselas, S. Pictures from a Revolution ( DVD) ,Magnum Photos, 1991, 26th November 2009http://store.magnumphotos.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=2068 Meiselas, S. Statement, Threads of the Woven, 26th November 2009 http://www.universes-in-universe.de/woven-maze/meiselas/index.html Susan Meiselas, 26th November 2009 http://www.susanmeiselas.com/ Susan Meiselas, Maryland Art Source, 26th November 2009,http://www.marylandartsource.org/artists/detail_000000123.html Read More