Susan Meiselas
Sunday, September 16th, 2019 7:30 PM PST
San Francisco Art Institute Lecture Hall
800 Chestnut St, San Francisco, CA 94133
This event is presented in partnership with the San Francisco Art Institute
About Susan Meiselas:
Susan Meiselas is a documentary photographer who lives and works in New York. She has been a member of Magnum Photos since 1976 and is well known for her documentation of human rights issues in Latin America. Her work ‘raises provocative questions about documentary practice, and the relationship between photographer and subject from war and human rights to cultural identity and domestic violence’.
Meiselas is the author of Carnival Strippers (1976), Nicaragua (1981), Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History (1997), Pandora’s Box (2001), Encounters with the Dani (2003) Prince Street Girls (2016) and A Room Of Their Own (2017).
She has co-edited two published collections: El Salvador, Work of 30 Photographers (1983) and Chile from Within (1990), rereleased as an e-book in 2013, and also co-directed two films: Living at Risk (1985) and Pictures from a Revolution (1991) with Richard P. Rogers and Alfred Guzzetti.
Her photographs are included in American and international collections. In 1992 she was made a MacArthur Fellow and most recently was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship (2015).
Mediations, a survey exhibition of her work from the 1970s to the present is currently on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Meiselas also curated the exhibition Coal + Ice on view now at the Ft. Mason Center for Arts and Culture. (see more about both below)
COAL + ICE Exhibition • Fort Mason Center for Arts and Culture
The COAL + ICE Project is a documentary photography exhibition and climate festival created to amplify the conversation about climate change. The documentary photography exhibition is co-curated by Magnum photographer Susan Meiselas and renowned exhibition designer Jeroen de Vries, and features the work of over 40 photographers and video artists from around the world. COAL + ICE visually narrates the consequences triggered by the continued use of fossil fuels, following the trajectory of climate change from the dirty coal mines deep within the Earth, to the vanishing glaciers of the Greater Himalaya. The exhibition culminates in global consequences and an exploration of visionary solutions.
Mediations Exhibition at SFMOMA
Mediations July 21–October 21, 2018
From war and human rights to cultural identity and domestic violence, Susan Meiselas’s (American, b. 1948) work covers a wide range of subjects and countries. This retrospective brings together projects from the beginning of her career in the 1970s to the present day, including her iconic portraits of carnival strippers, vivid color images of the conflicts in Central America in the 1980s, and an ongoing investigation into the history and aftermath of the Kurdish genocide. A member of Magnum Photos since 1976, Meiselas creates work that raises provocative questions about documentary practice, and the relationship between photographer and subject. The exhibition highlights her unique working method, combining photography, video, sound, and installation to explore different scales of time and conflict, ranging from the personal to the geopolitical.
This exhibition is coproduced by Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, and Jeu de Paume, Paris, in collaboration with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for its presentation in San Francisco.