HOW FUNDEMENTAL CONVICTIONS UNDERPIN THE INCLUSIVE APPROACH OF SUSAN  MEISELAS’S PHOTOGRAPHY

“The camera is an excuse “to be someplace you otherwise don’t belong. It gives me both a point of connection and a point of separation”

- Susan Meiselas

The American photographer, who joined Magnum in 1976, has spent a prolific career creating work that delves deep into the lives of others, indeed sometimes in battle zones, but often in quieter settings, where her subjects become collaborative forces in making work that represents far more than the resulting series of photographs.

Mediations, a retrospective of Meiselas’ career opens at FOMU Antwerp on February 17, and runs until June 4, 2023. In this article from 2018, we revisit some key moments from her career and the principles that shaped her photographic practice.

For Meiselas, the photograph forms only part of a larger project of documenting and forging connection and understanding. “The photographs are immediate personal encounters that last only a moment,” she says; “These encounters may later create a bridge for constructing larger narratives, which go beyond someone’s personal story to a wider national or cultural history. The picture is then merely the starting point.”Linchpins of community engagement in Meiselas’s photographic storytelling form a collaborative approach that has manifested throughout her work, from strippers in New England to an insurrection in Nicaragua. Looking back over some of the key defining stories of her career for a new book On the Frontline, Meiselas provides an insightful personal commentary on the trajectory of her photographic practice, and offers takeaway considerations for photographers looking to deepen their relationships with the subjects they work with.

https://www.magnumphotos.com/photographer/susan-meiselas/

https://www.susanmeiselas.com/

Arts And Culture

“To make a good portrait, you need to reveal a private moment, which can feel like an act of theft.”

- Susan Meiselas

Being Photographed

Whilst living in a boarding house in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1971, Meiselas turned the camera on herself first. The feelings she encountered with the subjects of her photographs would inform her collaborative approach henceforth: “To make a good portrait, you need to reveal a private moment, which can feel like an act of theft.”

“Then there is both the possibility of the construction of the portrait and the capture of a moment. I wanted to place myself in the boarding house because I lived there and was present. At the same time, I felt invisible. That invisibility creates a tension throughout my work. I am present, but I want to avoid the focus on myself. I am not a ‘fly on the wall’: I don’t pretend not to be there, but I am not the ‘story’. I might be the bridge, the guide, and in some sense the collaborator with the subject.“