TBW Books announces the publication of 44 Irving Street, 1970–1971 by Susan Meiselas, in collaboration with Higher Pictures on the occasion of Meiselas’s exhibition of the same name at the gallery.
In 1970, while a student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Susan Meiselas was living in a boarding house at 44 Irving Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts. What began as a class project evolved into a deeply empathetic portrait of community domestic life. Meiselas photographed her neighbors in the building—many of them strangers—inside their rooms, initiating a collaborative exchange by sharing contact sheets and inviting written responses. These reflections appear alongside the photographs, offering insight into how her subjects saw themselves.
Boarding houses like 44 Irving Street were transitional spaces, yet Meiselas found individuality and self-expression in each room. Her portraits full of personal detail and visual texture reveal a rich inner life often hidden in shared housing. The handwritten letters act as a kind of written punctum, a counterpoint to the image that pierces the surface with honesty and introspection.
This early body of work helped shape Meiselas’s enduring approach to photography as a form of connection and dialogue. “It wasn’t about the formalism of photography,” she notes. “It was about the narrative and the connectivity.”
Susan Meiselas : 44 Irving Street, 1970–1971
TBW Books
Saddle-stitched softcover with flaps and two tipped-in chromogenic prints
66 pages, 46 plates
8.5 x 11 in / 215.9 x 279.4 mm
ISBN 978-1-942953-81-4
www.tbwbooks.com
