SUSAN MEISELAS
LIKE MANY of my generation, I first became aware of the work of Susan Meiselas through her powerful images from Nicaragua, during the late 1970s, when the Sandinista revolutionaries toppled the military dictatorship of President Anastasio Somoza. As well as her close proximity to the fighting, what made Susan’s pictures captivating was the beautiful colour palette of her Kodachromes, depicting revolutionaries hurling Molotov cocktails and masked fighters posing against vivid street murals. There was a poetic quality to her war images that seemed unique for the time. Her fellow American journalists and photographers certainly thought so: in 1979 she was awarded the Robert Capa Gold Medal for ‘outstanding courage and reporting’ by the New York-based Overseas Press Club. Forty years have elapsed since that accolade, so I feel compelled to ask Susan what she’s up to now, as she prepares for a Spring visit to the UK. “I just came in on a redeye from Sundance and I’m just a little bit bleary, but I’m definitely all in one piece,” she replies. Sundance is America’s largest independent film festival, held every January in Utah, and it’s intriguing to hear that contemporary films continue to provide inspiration for this renowned master of the documentary even to this very day…
STORY BEHIND THE SHOT
PORTRAIT OF LENA
This image was the cover of Susan’s seminal 1976 book, Carnival Strippers…
Lena was one of many strippers she photographed over several years after first encountering the girls’ shows of the country fairs touring America’s north east states. Taken in Vermont, 1973, Lena was standing on a bally box to draw punters into the show tent behind her. Recalling the moment, Susan recently told the BBC: “I had no idea who she was–just the flaunting of herself was so
