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. \u201cThey\u2019d see me and yell, take a picture, take a picture,\u201d she recalls. \u201cEvery time I walked to the market, down the street.\u201dPrince 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\u2019 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 \u2014 a precious distillation of these girls\u2019 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\u2019t: her Leica became part of the furniture. \u201cI was a stranger to them, but they invited me in,\u201d she adds, standing in front of a selection from the series being installed at Somerset House in London.\u00a0The 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. \u201cSusan doesn\u2019t just take pictures \u2014 she listens, collaborates and remembers.\u201dBorn 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 (\u201cI don\u2019t think the photo of me really gives the essence of me\u201d, 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 \u201cbally box\u201d 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.\u00a0Meiselas was startled, but immediately compelled. \u201cI had to understand something of what I was observing, which was the intensity of these encounters,\u201d she says. \u201cIt was the male gaze, that\u2019s what I was looking at.\u201dIt wasn\u2019t easy to get access, particularly as a female photographer \u2014 \u201c\u2018no ladies, no babies,\u2019 that\u2019s what they\u2019d say,\u201d she remembers drily \u2014 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\u2019d print contact sheets and invite her subjects to choose their favourite shots. She also taped interviews, encouraging them to speak for themselves.\u00a0\u201cA 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.\u201dThere are male gazes aplenty in the photographs Meiselas printed \u2014 she often crouched hidden behind the stage, looking out into the leering crowd \u2014 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.\u00a0To another photographer\u2019s eye \u2014 perhaps a male one \u2014 this might be an image of exploitation. But Meiselas saw something more nuanced. \u201cI had such respect for it, the physical and emotional labour,\u201d she says. \u201cI certainly didn\u2019t have the guts to do what they did.\u201d She laughs. \u201cI mean, I did try it once.\u201d\u00a0What, stripping off and performing? \u201cYeah. 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.\u201dFew would doubt Meiselas\u2019s 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\u2019d photographed and returned year after year \u2014\u00a0the antithesis of hit-and-run war photography.\u00a0A 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 \u2014 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\u2019s still in touch with the Prince Street girls, it turns out; they\u2019re now in Staten Island and New Jersey, and grandmothers. She hasn\u2019t made their portraits for a while, partly because she no longer feels the need: they have smartphones and snap plenty of their own. \u201cThat reminds me: I must message them, tell them they\u2019re here in London!\u201d she says abruptly.The term \u201cco-creation\u201d has become fashionable in photography \u2014 usually codified as an attempt to adjust the power balance between artist and subject, producing something more collaborative \u2014 but what\u2019s striking is that she\u2019s been doing this kind of thing for decades, I say. \u201cPeople are still very preoccupied about the question of being from outside versus inside,\u201d she replies. \u201cI think those are artificial questions, in certain ways. You resolve it by finding a reason to be there.\u201dAt Magnum, she has championed work by women and tried hard to end the agency\u2019s reputation for being a photojournalistic boy\u2019s 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. \u201cIt was a reckoning for us,\u201d she says. \u201cI think we handled it professionally, but it was very painful.\u201dThe photographic world is infinitely more plural than it was, Meiselas points out. \u201cIt\u2019s constantly changing. I was the youngest of the women photographers when I came into Magnum, and now I\u2019m the oldest. We\u2019re always moving onward.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Now in her late 70s, she claims not to have the appetite for new projects. But she\u2019s busy with the Magnum Foundation, the agency\u2019s 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. \u201cWith Trump, the idea is as relevant now as it was then,\u201d she says grimly.I\u2019m 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? \u201cIt\u2019s much harder to feel the necessity to document in the way I think many of us did,\u201d she says. \u201cThere are so many more eyes on the world.\u201d But that\u2019s always been the challenge for photographers, she adds. \u201cWhy am I in a particular place? What am I contributing, really?\u201dWhen I point out that her contribution fills the walls around us, she wrinkles her nose. \u201cIt\u2019s wonderful, of course, but is the award about my photographs or the relationship to the communities I\u2019ve become part of?\u201d Maybe both, I venture; it\u2019s hard to separate the two. \u201cOK, fine,\u201d she shoots back. \u201cBut I don\u2019t think it\u2019s about me at all.\u201dSusan 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 \u2018Susan Meiselas: Nicaragua\u2019 is published by Aperture<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":279548,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-279547","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279547","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=279547"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279547\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":279549,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279547\/revisions\/279549"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/279548"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=279547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=279547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=279547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}