Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic In the spring of 1975, Susan Meiselas was riding her bike through Little Italy in New York when a sudden flash of light forced her to brake. A gang of girls, aged maybe 10, were standing on Prince Street holding a mirror, trying to dazzle passers-by. Some people might have called the cops, but Meiselas went over to say hello. Then, charmed and mildly intimidated by their chutzpah, she grabbed her camera. It became a kind of game. “They’d see me and yell, take a picture, take a picture,” she recalls. “Every time I walked to the market, down the street.”Prince Street Girls, as Meiselas named the project, was radically different from much of the street photography being shot in New York at the time. Instead of confronting or ambushing her subjects, Meiselas sought to win the girls’ confidence as they hung out on the block, chewed gum, squabbled, goofed around. The quietly observational black-and-white frames she produced are almost shocking in their lack of artifice — a precious distillation of these girls’ lives as they take first communion, then mutate into gawky adolescents, experiment with smoking and angle for the attention of boys. Often they seem barely aware the camera is even there.In a way, says Meiselas, it wasn’t: her Leica became part of the furniture. “I was a stranger to them, but they invited me in,” she adds, standing in front of a selection from the series being installed at Somerset House in London. The London show, which marks Meiselas being honoured by the Sony World Photography Awards, is the first time the Prince Street series and several others have been exhibited in the UK. It is also an opportunity to reflect on an extraordinary, multi-stranded career. Meiselas might be best known for her photographs of conflict in Nicaragua and El Salvador, and for being a leading light of the celebrated Magnum photo agency. But the beating heart of her work is arguably the more intimate projects, often focusing on female experience: explorations of the lives of teenage girls and soldiers in basic training, sex workers and survivors of domestic violence. Many are on show in London.Though the images are remarkably varied, Meiselas seems to cast the same generous eye on everyone and everything she encounters, argues Fiona Rogers, a photography curator at the V&A. “Susan doesn’t just take pictures — she listens, collaborates and remembers.”Born in Baltimore in 1948, she found photography almost by accident, while studying visual education at Harvard in the early 1970s. One day she was handed a large-format 4×5 view camera and told to find something to point it at. She ended up making portraits of the residents of the boarding house she was living in and inviting them to comment on the results, which she printed alongside, in a foretaste of collaborations she would attempt later (“I don’t think the photo of me really gives the essence of me”, one reads). Within five years, remarkably, she was a member of Magnum.The project that won her that accolade, Carnival Strippers, is also on view at Somerset House. Like Prince Street Girls, it began with a chance encounter. In the summer of 1971, Meiselas and her partner came across an agricultural fair in rural New England and noticed that, next to the rides and the biggest-tomato competition, there was a travelling strip act. Women in lingerie and little else would parade on a makeshift “bally box” out front, trying to drum up custom in full view of anyone passing. Every so often, men would slip through the curtain to experience the adult show inside. Meiselas was startled, but immediately compelled. “I had to understand something of what I was observing, which was the intensity of these encounters,” she says. “It was the male gaze, that’s what I was looking at.”It wasn’t easy to get access, particularly as a female photographer — “‘no ladies, no babies,’ that’s what they’d say,” she remembers drily — but once she was in, she found something unexpected: a story of solidarity and survival. She came back the following year, then two summers more, slowly building relationships with the women who danced. Again, she’d print contact sheets and invite her subjects to choose their favourite shots. She also taped interviews, encouraging them to speak for themselves. “A lot of them were from small towns, creating an independent livelihood. Some had escaped men they were married to, or abusive relationships. And yet they were being judged for what they did.”There are male gazes aplenty in the photographs Meiselas printed — she often crouched hidden behind the stage, looking out into the leering crowd — but so is tenderness and world-weary humour. One image, caught in a dressing room in Fryeburg, Maine in 1975, depicts a group of women playing cards nude, utterly unselfconscious. Another, which became justly famous, shows a woman she became particularly close to, Lena, standing in her underwear in the spotlight, statuesque and heroic, surrounded by dumbfounded men. To another photographer’s eye — perhaps a male one — this might be an image of exploitation. But Meiselas saw something more nuanced. “I had such respect for it, the physical and emotional labour,” she says. “I certainly didn’t have the guts to do what they did.” She laughs. “I mean, I did try it once.” What, stripping off and performing? “Yeah. I felt if I was trying to understand what it felt like to go out there, I had to. I lasted a few seconds. It was terrifying.”Few would doubt Meiselas’s courage or tenacity. During the civil war in Nicaragua, where she travelled soon afterwards, she learned street Spanish and produced surprisingly gentle, meditative work, this time in colour. She ended up building relationships with the people she’d photographed and returned year after year — the antithesis of hit-and-run war photography. A journey to northern Iraq, where she travelled to document mass graves after the first Gulf War in 1991, led to a deep encounter with the Kurds. Again, she spent years on the project — burrowing in archives, assembling documents, diaries and work by local photographers, attempting to uncover the visual history of a persecuted people. It eventually became a website and a book.She’s still in touch with the Prince Street girls, it turns out; they’re now in Staten Island and New Jersey, and grandmothers. She hasn’t made their portraits for a while, partly because she no longer feels the need: they have smartphones and snap plenty of their own. “That reminds me: I must message them, tell them they’re here in London!” she says abruptly.The term “co-creation” has become fashionable in photography — usually codified as an attempt to adjust the power balance between artist and subject, producing something more collaborative — but what’s striking is that she’s been doing this kind of thing for decades, I say. “People are still very preoccupied about the question of being from outside versus inside,” she replies. “I think those are artificial questions, in certain ways. You resolve it by finding a reason to be there.”At Magnum, she has championed work by women and tried hard to end the agency’s reputation for being a photojournalistic boy’s club. There have been challenges: in 2021, the agency experienced a #MeToo moment after a Magnum member, David Alan Harvey, was forced to resign after being accused of inappropriate behaviour with young female photographers. “It was a reckoning for us,” she says. “I think we handled it professionally, but it was very painful.”The photographic world is infinitely more plural than it was, Meiselas points out. “It’s constantly changing. I was the youngest of the women photographers when I came into Magnum, and now I’m the oldest. We’re always moving onward.” Now in her late 70s, she claims not to have the appetite for new projects. But she’s busy with the Magnum Foundation, the agency’s nonprofit arm, and when we speak is just back from seeing a presentation of one of her Kurdistan pieces in Vienna. Earlier this year, she was in Texas to supervise an installation of a project exploring border crossings, partly based on her Central American work. “With Trump, the idea is as relevant now as it was then,” she says grimly.I’m interested in what she feels about the changing state of photojournalism, especially in an era of smartphones and AI-generated imagery. Is there a still a role for reportage? “It’s much harder to feel the necessity to document in the way I think many of us did,” she says. “There are so many more eyes on the world.” But that’s always been the challenge for photographers, she adds. “Why am I in a particular place? What am I contributing, really?”When I point out that her contribution fills the walls around us, she wrinkles her nose. “It’s wonderful, of course, but is the award about my photographs or the relationship to the communities I’ve become part of?” Maybe both, I venture; it’s hard to separate the two. “OK, fine,” she shoots back. “But I don’t think it’s about me at all.”Susan Meiselas is the recipient of the 2025 Outstanding Contribution to Photography, Sony World Photography Awards; exhibition at Somerset House, London, April 17-May 5, worldphoto.org. The fourth edition of ‘Susan Meiselas: Nicaragua’ is published by Aperture
