Susan Meiselas, El Salvador © Alon Reininger

Susan Meiselas: Cornell Capa Award

The photography of Susan Meiselas (born in Maryland in 1948) has always expressed her conscience, from her passionately engaged work in Central America to her most recent project tracing the history and representations of the Dani people of the West Papuan highlands.

The same year that Meiselas received her M.A. in visual education from Harvard University, she started working as an assistant film editor on the Frederick Wiseman documentary Basic Training. Shortly thereafter, at the age of twenty-four, she taught photography workshops for teachers and children in New York's South Bronx. During those summers, she traveled throughout New England to photograph and interview women who earned their living in girl shows for small town carnivals. The photographs were published in her first book, Carnival Strippers, in 1976. That year, Meiselas joined Magnum Photos.

Meiselas’s coverage of hostilities in Central America during the 1970s and 1980s was published throughout the world. She was presented the Robert Capa Gold Medal for "outstanding courage and reporting” by the Overseas Press Club in 1979, for her work in Nicaragua, later published in the 1981 book Nicaragua. She served as an editor and contributor to the books El Salvador: The Work of Thirty Photographers (1983) and Chile from Within (1991). Meiselas has also co-directed two films based on her involvement in Nicaragua, Living at Risk: The Story of a Nicaraguan Family (1985) and Pictures from a Revolution (1991).

In 1997, she completed a six-year project on the 100-year photographic history entitled Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History—an exhibition, book, and website. Using a similar approach, Encounters with the Dani, part of the First ICP Triennial of Photography and Video, pieces together a richly layered visual history of the Dani through the eyes of outsiders. Both projects examine the relationship between power and representation and register a shift in her working process from photographer to collector and curator.

Meiselas is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Leica Award for Excellence (1982), the Photojournalist of the Year Award from the ASMP (1982), and the Hasselblad Foundation Photography Prize (1994). She was named a MacArthur Fellow in 1992. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group shows at the International Center of Photography, Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago, among many others. She lives in New York City.

www.susanmeiselas.com