Susan Meiselas: Seeing with Empathy, Shooting with Fire
A Tribute and Critique by a Former Student, Mark Anning
Susan Meiselas isn’t just a Magnum Photos and Sony World Photography Awards legend. She’s a lightning bolt in a trench coat, stalking the margins of conflict zones, carnivals, and communities with the kind of camera that doesn’t just observe—it interrogates. For more than five decades, Meiselas has taught the world how to see. And if you’re lucky—as I was—she’s taught you, too.
Susan Meiselas was named the recipient of the Outstanding Contribution to Photography Award for the Sony World Photography Awards 2025. This lifetime achievement honour recognises her transformative impact on the field over five decades.
Meiselas is globally recognised for documenting women’s lives and human rights issues in Latin America, the Middle East, and the US. Her projects are characterised by long-term commitment, community collaboration, and narrative depth, often blending photographs with testimonies and archival material.
“I don’t know what I’m going to come back with. I don’t go with a checklist. Many times I don’t go on assignment. I just go because I feel like whatever it is that’s happening in that particular place is important. It’s about being a witness to it—documenting it and recording it. In the places I’ve chosen to be, over time it becomes more obvious which of those moments are critical” – Susan Meiselas
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From Carnival Show Strippers to the Mountains of Nicaragua
Susan Meiselas rose to fame with her 1976 series Carnival Strippers, a raw, intimate portrayal of women performing in small-town sideshows across New England. Rather than exploiting or idealizing, Meiselas collaborated with her subjects, recording their voices, letting them narrate their own stories. This marked a through-line in her work: a deeply feminist, radically humanist commitment to agency. Meiselas was accepted into Magnum Photos photography cooperative the same year.
From 1972 to 1975, Susan Meiselas spent her summers travelling from town to town with small-time carnival troupes across New England, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina. Her lens focused on the women who performed striptease in so-called “girl shows”—capturing not just their stage acts but their downtime backstage, in dressing rooms, motels, and fleeting moments of reflection.
Alongside the photographs, she recorded interviews with the dancers, their boyfriends, managers, and the mostly male spectators, creating a layered audio-visual portrait of a world hidden in plain sight.
“Dig in, follow your instincts and trust your curiosity.” – Susan Meiselas
Carnival Strippers was revolutionary for its time. Created in the early years of the women’s movement, it documented women not as symbols or sex objects, but as complex individuals negotiating work, sexuality, and agency. Meiselas did not shoot from a distance—she listened, engaged, and asked questions. Her work revealed the contradictions of performance and power, exploitation and empowerment.
By giving voice to women who were rarely heard and even more rarely respected, Carnival Strippers became an essential document of feminist documentary practice and remains a landmark in participatory photography.
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Prince Street Girls (1975–1990)
Prince Street Girls (1975–1990) is a deeply personal, long-term project in which Susan Meiselas photographed a group of young girls growing up in New York’s Little Italy.
Starting when the Prince Street Girls were around 8 to 10 years old, Meiselas documented their lives over the years as they moved from childhood to adolescence and into early adulthood.
The images capture a strong sense of place—stoops, streets, and summer sidewalks—as well as the evolving dynamics of friendship, identity, and coming of age in a close-knit urban community. The project is tender without sentimentality, offering a rare, sustained view of girlhood and the subtle transitions of time.
Roseann on the way to Manhattan Beach, New York City, 1978, by photographer Susan Meiselas. Copyright: © Susan Meiselas / Magnum Photos. Used with permission Sony World Photography Awards 2025
“Looking at contact sheets, it’s a great set of footprints. Either you got it or you didn’t. You could have gotten it, you should’ve moved. I think you’re plagued with that and then suddenly you find a frame and it just seems to be there, it just seems to know itself and sort of reveal itself. That’s the harmony.” – Susan Meiselas
This contact sheet is from Susan Meiselas: Mediations by Susan Meiselas, Hardcover, 2018.
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What Is Susan Meiselas’ Work Different?
Then came Nicaragua, 1978–1979. Her photographs of the Sandinista revolution—most famously the molotov-throwing man in a homemade gas mask—weren’t just visually explosive; they were historically catalytic. These weren’t dispatches from a safe distance. Meiselas was in the thick of it, bridging journalism and art with haunting urgency.
“A documentary photographer can cross the line and show that the conflict zone is not just a battleground in a distant land; it is also in our homes, it is self-inflicted, it’s in our heads.” – Susan Meiselas
Susan Meiselas’s iconic image of the molotov-throwing man taken during the Nicaraguan revolution, quickly transcended its original context. Reproduced on posters, murals, and protest banners, it became a powerful symbol of resistance—adopted by Nicaraguans themselves as a visual shorthand for defiance, revolution, and national identity. The image took on a life of its own, blurring the line between photojournalism and political iconography.
Plenty of war photographers capture drama. Meiselas captures complexity. Her lens lingers in the moral fog of human experience, not just the flash of conflict. Whether documenting the Kurdish genocide in Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History, or returning to El Salvador decades after first photographing there, Meiselas insists on context—on layering history, testimony, image, and meaning.
She doesn’t parachute in and collect trauma. She returns, listens, learns. Her multi-year projects read like epic documentaries with footnotes scrawled in blood, laughter, and memory.
“It’s always more comfortable to be in your cozy home with your friends and close ones but sometimes you just need to venture out to pursue the work that is important to you.” – Susan Meiselas
Susan Meiselas: Nicaragua: June 1978-July 1979
“What worries me is that we want to close down our relationship to the world at large. In other words, people’s instincts are overwhelmed by the amount of images, or they can’t distinguish anymore between Rwanda or Bosnia or Somalia.” – Susan Meiselas
Teaching as Witnessing
Having Susan Meiselas as a tutor is like being handed a flamethrower and then being told, “Make soup, not war.” She challenges you to look harder, to sit in discomfort, and—above all—to earn your subject’s trust.
“For me, the essence of documentary photography has always been to do with evidence. I see myself in the tradition of encounter and witness—a “witness” that sees the photograph as evidence.” – Susan Meiselas
She doesn’t care if you’ve got decades of experience or just bought your first camera on eBay. Her feedback is surgical, but never cruel. Her questions linger longer than your shutter speed. And her ability to draw out the “why” behind your work—well, that’s the kind of gift that rewires your entire practice.
She’s mentored hundreds of photographers—some wide-eyed twenty-somethings, others seasoned veterans looking to retool. To all of us, she gave the same invaluable directive: stop shooting what you think you’re supposed to see. Start seeing what you’ve been afraid to understand.
“What I’ve learned over fifteen years of working in the field is how to create opportunities out of accidents. I’ve learned not to be too fixed on what I was supposed to do, to be flexible, and to perceive moments. Sometimes things don’t fall into place as you had hoped, and you can stay fixed to one idea or you can see something else that might lead you a little bit off the path.” – Susan Meiselas
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A Critique: The Legacy and the Limits
It would be lazy praise to call Meiselas “iconic” and leave it there. Yes, she’s shaped generations of photographers. Yes, her influence is everywhere from photojournalism to contemporary art. But even icons deserve scrutiny.
Some critics argue that her work walks a tightrope between documentation and aesthetics—particularly in war zones. Can violence ever be framed beautifully without losing its moral punch? Meiselas has answered with nuance, often weaving in text, archival material, and community dialogue to shift focus away from single, seductive images.
She doesn’t always tie her projects up with a bow, and that’s the point. Her work leaves you with questions. That’s her power—and also her most controversial trait. She refuses to simplify, refuses to spoon-feed.
Legacy in the Frame
Meiselas isn’t just part of photography’s history. She’s a living, breathing challenge to its future. She’s the reason many of us still believe photography can do more than document—it can dismantle, rebuild, restore.
So here’s to Susan Meiselas: the eye behind the lens, the mind behind the mission, and the tutor whose voice you still hear whenever your finger hovers over the shutter.
Susan Meiselas received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College and her MA in visual education from Harvard University. Her accolades include a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim, and awards from Rencontres d’Arles and the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation. She has served as president of the Magnum Foundation and is represented by Cohen Amador Gallery, New York, and Rose Gallery, Los Angeles.
As the 18th recipient of the Outstanding Contribution to Photography at Sony World Photography Awards, Meiselas joins a prestigious roster of past honorees including Mary Ellen Mark, Martin Parr, Edward Burtynsky, and Sebastião Salgado.
Susan Meiselas’s major books:
Here’s a list of Susan Meiselas’s major books:
📘 Carnival Strippers (1976, rev. 2022)
Meiselas’s groundbreaking first monograph documents the lives of women performing striptease at small-town carnivals in the US during the early 1970s.
It’s a layered portrait that includes images, interviews, and the voices of performers, managers, and audience members—raising questions about agency, voyeurism, and performance.
Carnival Strippers, including first editions, are available to purchase from our affiliate Amazon, USA. We may earn a small commission if you purchase from this link, at no extra cost to you.
📘 Nicaragua: June 1978–July 1979 (1981)
This photo-essay captures the dramatic fall of the Somoza dictatorship during the Sandinista revolution. Meiselas’s vivid frontline photography helped define the visual record of the conflict and remains among the most iconic political photojournalism of the late 20th century.
In 2008, marking the 30th anniversary of the Nicaraguan popular insurrection and Susan Meiselas’s first trip to the country, Aperture released a new edition of her landmark book Nicaragua (available from Amazon). As the 40th anniversary approached, the book was reissued once again—this time with an augmented reality (AR) feature that adds a powerful new layer to the experience.
Readers can now access clips from Meiselas’s films Pictures from a Revolution (1991), in which she returns to Nicaragua to revisit the people and places she originally photographed, and Reframing History (2004), a project in which she collaborated with local communities to install mural-sized versions of her 1979 images at their original locations—turning photographs into enduring sites of memory.
Nicaragua: June 1978–July 1979 (1981) on Amazon, USA.
📘 El Salvador: The Work of Thirty Photographers (1983, editor)
While not exclusively her own photographs, Meiselas edited this collaborative volume showcasing photojournalistic coverage of El Salvador’s brutal civil war. It reflects her dedication to multi-voiced documentary storytelling.
El Salvador: The Work of Thirty Photographers, available from Amazon
📘 Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History (1997)
A deeply researched visual and historical archive of Kurdish identity and collective memory.
Meiselas challenges Western portrayals of Kurds by weaving a moving tapestry of a people long denied nationhood, juxtaposing with her own photographs with found images, maps, and oral histories, and historical materials collected from a century of outsiders and Kurds alike—colonial officials, anthropologists, missionaries, and the Kurdish people themselves.
By blending personal testimony with archival material, Kurdistan redefines how photography can serve as both a historical document and a platform for cultural self-representation.
Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History by Susan Meiselas (1997)
📘 Pandora’s Box (2001)
Pandora’s Box is Susan Meiselas’s provocative photographic exploration of a high-end Manhattan BDSM club run by Mistress Raven and her staff of 14.
Nicknamed the “Disneyland of Domination,” the 4,000-square-foot space is documented in Meiselas’s images, revealing the club’s elaborate rituals, strict hierarchies, and escapist fantasies. Meiselas takes an observational approach, navigating the space between desire, control, and performance.
Originally commissioned alongside Nick Broomfield’s documentary Fetishes, the book blends stark photography with pages made of latex, rubber, and colored gels, immersing the viewer in a world of power play and performance.
Pandora’s Box (TREBRUK PUBLISH) Hardcover, 2002 Words by Richard August, Mistress Delilah, Mistress Raven, and photos by Susan Meiselas. Original first editions can sell for $1,400 and more on Amazon, USA.
📘 Encounters with the Dani (2003)
In Encounters with the Dani, Susan Meiselas assembles a fragmented, multi-perspective history of the Dani people of West Papua, tracing how outsiders—from colonial officers and missionaries to anthropologists and eco-tourists—have shaped and represented their world since the 1930s.
Combining archival materials, media reports, tourist snapshots and photographs taken in the 1960s by ethnographers and explorers, the book highlights the complex power dynamics behind these portrayals, revealing how images and narratives have influenced the Dani’s evolving reality.
Meiselas adds her own documentation and commentary, interrogating the colonial gaze and the act of photographing so-called “discovered” cultures. It’s a reflective meditation on cultural encounter, visual representation, and the legacy of “discovery.”
Encounters With the Dani by Susan Meiselas, Hardcover, 2003 on Amazon.
📘 Prince Street Girls (2016)
A tender long-term project chronicling a group of young girls growing up in New York’s Little Italy from 1975 to the 1990s. It captures both friendship and transformation, showing how Meiselas’s camera bore witness across generations.
Prince Street Girls 1976-1979, by Susan Meiselas. Original editions are sometimes available on Amazon, USA.
📘 A Room of Their Own (2017)
Made in collaboration with women in a domestic violence shelter in the UK’s Black Country, this book features photographs of their personal spaces, along with their testimonies and artworks. The result is intimate, powerful, and deeply respectful.
📘 Tar Beach: Life on the Rooftops of Little Italy 1953–1974 (2020, editor)
Curated from the archive of photographer and neighbour Larry Racioppo, this book presents a warm, nostalgic view of working-class life in NYC, showcasing rooftop culture in summer. Meiselas served as editor, connecting it to her own Prince Street work.
Tar Beach: Life on the Rooftops of Little Italy 1953–1974 (2020, editor)
📘 Mediations (2018–2020, exhibition catalogue)
This retrospective catalogue offers an overview of Meiselas’s work from the 1970s to the present, reflecting on her career, process, and influence. It’s the most comprehensive single volume to date and includes multiple essays by and about her.
Susan Meiselas: Mediations by Susan Meiselas Hardcover, 2018
“That’s a total expression of what my psychology was back then and, to a degree, continues to be. The present but almost invisible photographer.” – Susan Meiselas. Self-portrait, 44 Irving Street, Cambridge MA, 1971 Copyright: © Susan Meiselas / Magnum Photos. Used with permission Sony World Photography Awards 2025
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Susan Meiselas Outstanding Contribution to Photography at Sony World Photography Awards 2025
A retrospective exhibition of her work at Somerset House, UK in 2025 showcased five major projects, including several never before exhibited in the UK:
- 44 Irving Street (1971) – intimate portraits of neighbours, paired with their reflections
- Carnival Strippers (1972–75) – behind-the-scenes of small-town strip shows with participant voices
- Prince Street Girls (1975–1990) – a long-term visual story of girls growing up in Little Italy, NYC
- Pandora’s Box (1995) – an immersive exploration of an NYC S&M club
- A Room of Their Own (2015–2017) – a collaborative project with survivors in a UK women’s refuge
“Over the past 50 years, I have had the privilege of witnessing history being made, sharing the often unseen lives of those engaged in its making. The work on display invites reflection not only on the photographs themselves but also on the relationships that shaped and inspired them.” – Susan Meiselas
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