FROM 11 OCTOBER, 2017, to 14 JANUARY, 2018 No.8 WWW
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WWW.FUNDACIOTAPIES.ORG No.8 FROM 11 OCTOBER, 2017, TO 14 JANUARY, 2018 SUSAN MEISELAS. MEDIATIONS P.2 Mediations 11.10.2017 − 14.01.2018 Susan Meiselas (Baltimore, Maryland, 1948) The career of Susan Meiselas reflects the most relevant transformations of modern photography. Since of she started practising documentary photography in the 1970s, her work has questioned the exchanges that occur with the individu- als she portrays, whether they are women performing in a travelling striptease show, subjected to the vexing gaze of their clients, or the victims of members of the Kurdish community unearthed after the Anfal military operation, a campaign directed against this community by the regime of Saddam Hussein. Meiselas has never been able to associate within the confines of a style. Each of her projects, many of them of long du- ration, introduces a radical and ongoing questioning of the photographic act. Meiselas's subjects participate in the rep- resentation of themselves. INTRODUCTION P. 3 In the late 1970s, she became one of the most celebrated photojournalists in the world for works such as her cover- age of the Sandinista Popular Revolution, often tainted by the uncertainty experienced before the events. Despite hav- ing worked on assignment for The New York Times, Meiselas observed the revolution as an event that defied normal press procedures. With Mediations (1982), the project that lends its title to this retrospective exhibition, Meiselas discov- ered the contingency of photography. Her Nicaraguan images published in different countries revealed that the circulation of her photographs generated a new space for the production of meanings, with interpretations that were beyond the control of the author. At a time when, thanks to new technologies, photography has become the object of an all-reaching exchange, Meiselas’s at- titude becomes unprecedented. The postproduction of images has overcome the classic concept of photography as an act of framing and capturing what happens in front of the camera. In this context, Meiselas’s archival projects constitute a valu- able precedent. Two of them, the ones devoted to Nicaragua and Kurdistan, are widely represented in this exhibition. Dis- played as installations, they deploy a photographic apparatus based on extended times of perception and the compilation of a visual history that challenges the foundations of modern photography. Co-produced by the Fundació Antoni Tàpies and the Jeu de Paume, the exhibition also includes a selection of photo- graphic series that consolidate the role of Meiselas as a pioneer in the critical revisions of documentary photogra- phy, a position she shares with artists such as Allan Sekula and Martha Rosler. These series are accompanied for the first time by unpublished documents and materials that re- veal the personal, technical and political complexities of the work of Meiselas. SUSAN MEISELAS. MEDIATIONS P.4 1948 Carolina Arts Commission and Mississippi Arts Born 21 June in Baltimore, Maryland. Commission. While teaching photography and an- imation in rural communities, she begins a 1970 series called Porch Portraits that depicts en- Receives a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College, counters with strangers in the South. Bronxville, New York. 1974 1971 Continues to work in South Carolina, Receives an M.Ed., Master’s degree in Visual where she develops a Bicentennial project Education, from Harvard University School of Ed- with teenagers. They collect photograph- ucation. While living at 44 Irving Street, a ic and oral histories for the exhibition A boarding house in Cambridge, Meiselas takes Photographic Genealogy: The History of Lando, 4 x 5” portraits of fellow residents. Each a company-owned mill town in South Carolina. portrait is accompanied by a text in which the Participates in her first group exhibition, subjects comment on how they see themselves Daredevils & Showgirls, at the Brockton Art represented in the photograph. Simultaneously Center in Brockton, Massachusetts, where she she works as an assistant editor to filmmaker shows work focusing on the life of one strip- Fred Wiseman on Basic Training. per, Lena. 1972 1975 Becomes a Photographic Consultant at the Appointed to the faculty of the Center for Community Resources Institute, where she de- Understanding Media, New School for Social velops a curriculum for teachers in New York Research, New York, and works with media stud- City public schools using visual materials. ies educators in local public schools. As a During the summer, while following state consultant for the Polaroid Foundation, she fairs, she encounters the itinerant girl conceives of and edits Learn to See, a compi- shows, which she then follows for the next lation of the work of teachers using Polaroid three years. materials in the classroom. Her first solo show, Carnival Strippers, opens at the CEPA 1973 Gallery in Buffalo, New York; accompanying the Travels to South Carolina and Mississippi photographs are audio recordings made with the as an artist-in-residence with the South strippers, their managers and spectators. CHRONOLOGY P. 5 1976 the Overseas Press Club. She will continue to Joins Magnum Photos. Carnival Strippers is photograph in Nicaragua over the next twen- published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the ty-five years. United States and Éditions du Chêne in France. She begins a project called Prince Street 1980 Girls, in which she photographs girls living Continues to live and work in Central America. in her neighbourhood in Little Italy. In the Documents the discovery and exhumation of the winter, she begins to photograph homeless men American Maryknoll sisters, killed by death living on the Bowery in New York City. These squads in El Salvador, 4 December 1980. men take temporary jobs as Santa Claus with the Volunteers of America. The Volunteers of 1981 America series continues through 1978. In January, Meiselas is wounded in a land-mine explosion near Suchitoto, El Salvador, while 1977 on assignment for Time covering the ‘Last Travels to Latin America for the first time. Offensive’ of the FMLN. With her is photogra- She visits Cuba with seven other American pher John Hoagland, who is also wounded, and photographers through the Center for Cuban cameraman Ian Mates, who is killed. She travels Studies; Parsons Gallery in New York orga- to Argentina to photograph the Mothers of the nizes an exhibition of their work. In May, Plaza de Mayo and the ‘disappeared’; the pho- the Everyman Company of Brooklyn, directed tographs are published in the September issue by Ricardo E. Velez, produces a play called of Life. Nicaragua, June 1978 – July 1979 is Strippers based on the interviews used in the published by Pantheon, with editions in Spanish book. She travels to Chad in the fall with and French. In December, she photographs the French filmmaker Raymond Depardon to cover the aftermath of the El Mozote Massacre with The civil war and resulting refugee crisis. They New York Times reporter Raymond Bonner. The follow Bernard Kouchner, cofounder of Doctors New York Times publishes the photographs on 21 without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières, on February 1982, and the work is later used as one of their first missions. evidence in congressional debates to halt U.S. military aid to El Salvador. 1978 Travels to Nicaragua for the first time in 1982 June, staying six weeks. Her photographs are Presents Mediations, an exhibition decon- published in The New York Times Magazine under structing the way the international media pub- the headline ‘National Mutiny in Nicaragua’ (30 lishes her photographs from Nicaragua, first July 1978). She returns to Nicaragua in August at Side Gallery, Newcastle-on-Tyne, and later just after the National Palace in Managua is at Camerawork, London. captured and before the first insurrections begin in Masaya, Esteli and Matagalpa. 1983 Documents the destruction of infrastructure 1979 and villages in northern Nicaragua by the con- Makes her first trip to El Salvador with Alan tras during the U.S.-backed ‘counter-revolu- Riding for The New York Times to cover the tion’ and continues to photograph extensively assassinations of local priests. She returns in El Salvador. With Harry Mattison and Fae after the October military coup and covers the Rubenstein, she edits El Salvador: Work of Thirty civil war for the next four years, including Photographers, published by Writers & Readers. the popular resistance and the Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN). During 1984 this period, she also continues to photograph Curates the exhibition From Central America, the conflict in Nicaragua, covering Sandinista held at Central Hall in New York, in conjunction training camps in Costa Rica and the northern with Artists Call Against U.S. Intervention in mountains of Nicaragua, the last offensive in Central America. In collaboration with Visual Masaya and Managua, and the beginning of re- Studies Workshop, she organizes the touring construction following the overthrow of Somoza exhibition Inside El Salvador. The show begins on 19 July. For her photographs of Nicaragua, at the Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego, she receives the Robert Capa Gold Medal from and the International Center of Photography, SUSAN MEISELAS. MEDIATIONS P.6 New York, travelling to colleges, public li- through 1990. The photographs are exhibited braries and museums over the next two years. in Los Vecinos at the Museum of Photographic Mediations is presented again at the Museum Arts, San Diego; the exhibition includes Folkwang in Essen, Germany. the work of three Mexican and four American photographers. 1985 Directs and produces, with Alfred Guzzetti and 1990 Richard Rogers, the film Living at Risk: The Collaborates with Chilean photographers on ed- Story of a Nicaraguan Family. For the ex- iting the book Chile from Within, which in- perimental documentary Voyages, produced in cludes the work of sixteen Chilean photogra- collaboration with director Marc Karlin for phers (published by W.W.