Connectivity: An Interview with Susan Meiselas

This interview took place on August 28, 2009, in New York. Magnum photographer Susan Meiselas is renowned for her war journalism, particularly for the pictures she took in Nicaragua in the seventies, which became some of the most famous images of that war.

Her website, www.susanmeiselas.com, displays her work and history and is accompanied by her own spoken narration, a combination of words and pictures that, I think, well represents her almost philosophical sensibility. As she has had many interviews about her combat journalism and her mammoth project on a photographic lineage of Kurdistan, Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History, this interview pursues her methods of approach and thinking. I gave her the questions beforehand, to which she refers in the interview, but we followed a conversational track. The two films we discussed the most were Pictures from a Revolution (US, 1991) and Voyages (UK, 1985). The former follows Meiselas when she returns to Nicaragua, ten years after the war, in an effort to find the people whose pictures she had taken. Voyages is a more experimental film, using still photos over which a camera passes back and forth and up and down. Both have a personal narration.

Drake Stutesman:

Let's focus on what you haven't had an opportunity to talk about, or what really interests you. If you really want to dwell on something, let's dwell on it. I was looking at Voyages again this morning, which is a very fascinating small piece that has many dimensions to it. Let me just start and we'll see how we go. I'll just go down the questions as they were, but we can dwell on some or move to others as you want.

Susan Meiselas:

Yes.

Figure 1.

From Pictures from a Revolution by Susan Meiselas, Alfred Guzzetti, Richard P. Rogers, 1991.

Figure 2.

From Pictures from a Revolution by Susan Meiselas, Alfred Guzzetti, Richard P. Rogers, 1991.

DS:

You mix words with your images. In your book of photographs Carnival Strippers, shot between 1972 and 1975, you include written pieces where the women discuss their lives. In the films Pictures from a Revolution in 1991 and Voyages in 1985 and also in the book of photographs of a New York S&M club, Pandora's Box, they all use narration or the spoken word or have a confessional, autobiographical piece. They seem to be more than simply auxiliary; they seem to be almost equal to the picture. What does this mixture of words and images mean to you?

SM:

I think that very early on, and principally this first project of Carnival Strippers, the sense of a photograph was a beginning point. It's interesting you say "text" or "words" and actually for me it was sound. It was their voices, their very words, the way they said things. So in fact the first representation of that work, Carnival Strippers, was in an installation form with the sound in an open space floating above and around the photographs. So it was that tension between what the photograph itself could tell or reveal and what people know about their lives that I would not have access to except though these exchanges. It becomes "words" when it's transformed into the medium of a book, though it began as an exhibition with sound, and actually I've exhibited it that way now and again since then. It's even better with the book being reprinted, because it allows for a sound track to be embedded in a CD in the back of the book. At the core, the project highlights my perceptions as I frame moments and then select them and sequence them, in contrast to those lives that are lived and that are complex, with their own deep understandings that they were willing to share.

DS:

I have two questions about that. Do you think that the living voice and the photograph need to be together? Do you think one is, in a sense, "less...