Jeu de Paume, in Paris, is presenting a comprehensive retrospective of American photographer Susan Meiselas, accompanied by a catalogue.
The material gathered in the exhibition currently presented at Jeu de Paume, in Paris, and co-produced with the SF MoMA and Fundacio Antoni Tapies, spans Susan Meiselas’s entire career. Including series that have rarely been published or exposed, this retrospective exhibition is rather critical, aiming at highlighting the questions raised by her work over the years. Drawing on Meiselas’s constant questioning of the role of photography as information and memory – and, thus, the contribution of the photographer, the subject, as well as the audience in a broad sense including media and politics , the exhibition encourages to apprehend her 40-year thick corpus in terms of overlaps and coherence. It is meaningful in this respect that the title chosen for the exhibition, Mediations, was originally that of a show accompanying Meiselas’s first book about Nicaragua. Regardless of time and geography, co-curators Carles Guerra, director of Fundacio Antoni Tapies, and Pia Viewing, curator at Jeu de Paume, invite us to constant back and forths.
While the eight contributors to the exhibition’s catalog seem to agree on defining Meiselas’s experience in Nicaragua as a turning point, each of them proposes different correlations within her work, inviting us to draw more. As Eduardo Cadava writes, “we can begin to read images across your corpus in new, unexpected, and I believe, wildly rich and productive ways”. Their very different perspectives attest to the complexity of Meiselas as a photographer – her who rebelled against the enduring codes of photojournalism; often chose to focus on the invisible; took a stand against the imperialism of the institutions; and struggled with the fact that photography has been inherent to the making of the world’s recent history.
Most of the contributors being Meiselas’s friends, they also bring in an intimate depth to the analyze of her work. Kristen Lubben’s last sentence is in that sense revealing: “She [i.e.. Meiselas] was observing girls becoming women and women striving for self-determination, while also in her own process of transforming into a different kind of photographer and woman.” Not to mention that Cavada’s text takes the form of what seems to be one of his long letters to her.
One can furthermore see in the title Mediations a reference to Meiselas’s conviction that a photograph is the result of a collaboration of some sort with her subject. As Corey Keller writes, “Meiselas deeply ethical practice hinges on a transformation of the charged relationship between the person photographing and the person being photographed from one of power to one of exchange”. This, in turns, enables for new narratives about the places and community that she has documented.
In May 2017, we learn from Cadava, Meiselas participated to the Desert Island Pics series at the Photo London Screening Room. The exercise consists in choosing what eight images one would most want to have with him or her if he or she was stranded on a desert island. As he suggests, the exhibition is an invitation for the viewer to pick 8 of Meiselas’s pictures, and to dive within her multilayered work as she herself dug down her subject matters and medium over the years.
Laurence Cornet
Laurence Cornet is a journalist specializing in photography and an independent curator. She lives in New York and Paris.
Exhibition : Susan Meiselas, Médiations
February 6th – May 20th, 2018
Jeu de Paume
1 place de la Concorde
75008 Paris
France
Catalogue : Susan Meiselas: Mediations
Foreword by Carles Guerra, Marta Gili.
Texts by Ariella Azoulay, Eduardo Cadava, Carles Guerra, Marianne Hirsch, Corey Keller, Kristen Lubben, Isin Önol, Pia Viewing.
Published by Damiani
US $35.00 CDN $45.00
