ICP: Susan Meiselas

The Susan Meiselas exhibit at the International Center for Photography is eye opening. Not only is Meiselas a master of visual composition, but she also uses her photographs to document the strife all around the world, in Nicaragua, in Kurdistan, and even in America. In all three of her sets she examines the notion of nationalism under oppressive regimes, while also looking closer at the individual’s identity.
In the collection of photographs entitled “Nicaragua” one can see how Meiselas uses the power of the photograph to illicit a reaction from viewers. One shot captures a bucolic hillside in the center of which rests a bare human spinal bone – a scene so gruesome it is difficult to contemplate the reality of the image. Others show street-side conflagrations and peasants sorting through ashes. Meiselas uses to her advantage the innate quality of the photograph to be factual and true, and by depicting real suffering and strife she unleashes the floodgates of human rights much like her predecessors Lewis Hine and Walker Evans.
In the same way, Meiselas uses photography to document the persecution of the Kurdish people in Iraq, an ethnic cleansing under Sadam Hussein’s rule that received relatively little publicity. Most images are simple family portraits; the Kurdish people were not allowed to take photographs and the plain, matter-of-fact representation of their rich culture is extremely emotive. Starring straight into the lens are old mothers aged far beyond their years with folk headdresses and very few teeth, yet Meiselas gives them a certain dignity, a saintly glow. In addition, Meiselas includes pictures of Kurdish people holding images of relatives, an obvious offense against the prohibition of photography. The risks these people took were great, however, they still chose to preserve the Kurdish legacy through photography.
Meiselas’s final and perhaps most complex set of photographs is “Carnival Strippers,” nestled in the back reaches of the ICP’s basement floor. This series documents the “Girls Show” of New England at the height of the women’s movement in America. Steadfast in her proclivity for journalistic photography, Meiselas captures women who are both “endangered by and controlling their environment while being supported by a community of other women.” Meiselas also includes a voice-over of the original interviews she conducted with the show girls. They speak of their disdain for their customers, their aspirations to “get real jobs,” and most importantly the dissimilarity of their identity onstage and backstage. This duality of character and the concept of the “show” is something Meiselas illustrates in her photographs. She does not depict the girls as sexual entities; instead, she shows them as real women inherently bound by friendship to one another. Meiselas’s portrayal of her subjects unadorned and virtually unaffected by modern “acceptable” society promotes her photographs from mere documentary to artistic expressions. She manufactures art out of what is already there – the purest, most visceral human emotions.