"Prince Street Girls"
Photographic exhibit
by Susan Meiselas
March 24 - May 7, 2004
Main Gallery, John Hope Franklin Center
Wednesday, March 24, 2004
Artist Talk, 7:00 PM :: 240 Franklin Center
Opening Reception, 8:30 - 10:00 PM
On an afternoon in spring 1975, Susan Meiselas was biking through her neighborhood of Little Italy in New York. Suddenly a blast of light flashed into her eyes. Its source was a group of kids standing with a mirror, focusing the sun on her face. That was the day she met the Prince Street girls, as she named them. And for more than twenty years, she has been photographing the girls as they grew, graduated, married and had children.
Meiselas was photographing the girls over a course of time that also saw her become one of the nation’s most important and singular photographers. A graduate of Sarah Lawrence and the Harvard School of Education, Meiselas had just completed her path-breaking collection Carnival Strippers, a study of strippers working small New England towns, when she met the Prince Street girls. In 1976, Meiselas was invited to join one of the most prestigious photojournalists collectives—Magnum Photos—to which she still belongs.
The 1976 Carnival Strippers holds in wondrous tension the photographer’s traditional single image with a brilliant and innovative narrative sequencing of photographs and text from the strippers, crews and audiences.
In 1978, she left New York for an assignment in Nicaragua, which kept her there for nearly a decade during which she shot some of the most memorable images of the Central American revolutions. Many of these photos were collected in the 1981 publication: Nicaragua, June 1978-July 1979 and in two films she co-directed “Living at Risk: The story of a Nicaraguan Family” (1986) and “Pictures from a Revolution” (1991). She also edited two important collections of Salvadoran and Chilean photography: El Salvador: Work of 30 Photographers (1983) and Chile from Within (1990, with text by Ariel Dorfman).
The photographic collections from the time in Central America were not just startling and challenging artistically but forwarded an important change in photojournalism; these works were designed as critical narrative engagements on important political issues that also provided important space for the views and ideas of the photographs’ subjects.
The concept of photography for the subject, first explored Carnival Strippers, opens greater opportunities for narrative development in photography. As we track the narrative developed by the photographer and her subjects we are less able to censor from our vision and thoughts the horrible. When we come to face the image of the torso with exposed backbone against the greens and browns of the countryside in “Execution site outside Managua, Nicaragua, 1978” we cannot escape the horrible feeling of presence at the moment of execution. Meiselas through the sequencing of photographs bring us to this image as if we are among those readied for execution. As she has written: “The recognition of this world is not the invention of it.”
Returning to Prince Street after a decade in Central America, she found that her girls had grown but also that her approach to photography had grown clearer. She found it difficult to integrate her life in New York among family and friends with her life as a journalist on the road. But this separation found interesting exploration in her next publication. In 1997, she completed a six-year project integrating her own work into the 100-year photographic history of Kurdistan in the book Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History (1997). The work takes Meiselas’ mastery of sequencing to a next step of integrating the photographs and words of many individuals into a coherent and persuasive political/social narrative. She had moved effectively from intimate history to national histories without any loss of artistic brilliance.
Kurdistan was followed in 2001 by her monograph Pandora’s Box, which explores a New York S&M club. The work journeys through a high-class sex club in a remarkable parallel to the narrative line of Carnival Strippers, where an understanding of the social life and economy of the business integrates with sexual performances. Meiselas’s most recent work, Encounters with the Dani (2003), reprises her narrative approach in Kurdistan. Here she tracks the Dani people of New Guinea from their “discovery” to their assertions of political autonomy in a transnational contest. This most recent work once again attests of her commitment to John Berger’s idea of photography for the subject.
Prince Street Girls is her longest commitment to a subject, and through the photographs shown in the current show, one can read the complex history of Meiselas’s development as an artist and narrator.
Susan Meiselas’s work has garnered international recognition including the Hasselblad Foundation Prize in 1994, the Maria Moors Cabot Prize from the Columbia Journalism School in 1994, Photojournalist of the Year, ASMP, 1982, the Leica Award of Excellence, 1982 and the Robert Capa Gold Medal, Overseas Press Club, 1979. She has been a Rockefeller Foundation, Lyndhurst, and NEA Fellow and was selected a MacArthur Fellow in 1992. She has honorary doctorates in fine arts from the Parson School of Art and the Art Institute of Boston.
She has had one-woman shows at the Art Institute of Chicago, Leica Gallery (New York), Whitney Museum of American Art and the Rose Gallery (L.A.). Her group exhibitions include the International Center of Photography, Museum of Modern Art (Oxford), New Museum of Contemporary Art, Centre Georges Pompidou, Menil Collection, Walter Art Center, and Fogg Museum (Harvard).
The talk and reception are part of a series presented by the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, the John Hope Franklin Center for Interdisciplinary and International Studies at Duke University, the Robertson Scholars Fund, and the Department of Art at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, in conjunction with the course The Documentary Imagination, taught by Wendy Ewald and Jeff Whetstone at Duke and UNC. All photographs courtesy of and copyright held by Susan Meiselas/Magnum Photo.
For more information, contact Rob Sikorski, r.sikorski@duke.edu or 919.684.2867