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PRESSKIT

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SUMMARY

HIGHLIGHTS OF THE EXHIBITION

PRESS RELEASE

BIOGRAPHY

THE EXHIBITION

CATALOGUE

PRESS VISUALS

PRACTICAL INFORMATION

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Cover Susan Meiselas Sandinistas at the walls of the Esteli National Guard headquarters: “Molotov Man”,Estelí,July16th1979 © Susan Meiselas/Magnum Photos

PARTNERS

Exposition coproduced by the Fundació Antoni Tàpies and the Jeu de Paume.

Thanks to the Hôtel Castille de Paris.

The Jeu de Paume receives public funding from the MINISTÈRE DE LA CULTURE

and its main corporate sponsors are NEUFLIZE OBC and MANUFACTURE JAEGER-LECOULTRE.

MEDIA PARTNERS

A NOUS PARIS, Arte, Courrier International, Le Monde et Slate.

TOURING OF THE EXHIBITION

SFMOMA, San Francisco: 21 July - 21 October 2018

WARNINGOne of the exhibition rooms is not recommended for visitors under the age of 18.

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EXHIBITION HIGHLIGHTS

� �In the late 1970s, without an assignment of any sort, Susan Meiselas went to Nicaragua to cover the popular insurrection following the assassination of the editor of the opposition newspaper LaPrensa. She became one of the most celebrated photojournalists in the world for her colour photographs of the Sandinista Popular Revolution. Some of them became icons of the Nicaraguan revolution. She didn’t see the insurrection as a series of isolated news events as a photojournalist would, but rather a historical process that was unfolding every day. Her approach was specific to the context of the conflict and the terrain.

� �This retrospective shows amongst other major works by Meiselas: Nicaragua - Mediations, (1978-1982) and Kurdistan (1991-2007), four series of early works, some of which have rarely been exhibited and her most recent work on domestic violence A Room of Their Own (2015-2017).

� �Susan Meiselas’s practice of documentary photography started in the 1970s. Since then her work has never ceased to question the exchanges that occur with the individuals she portrays. Each of her projects – many of which are long term – challenge the photographic act and the role that the image plays in contemporary society.

� �With Mediations, 1982, the project that lends its title to this retrospective exhibition, Meiselas revealed the effects that the circulation of images produces on their meaning. At a time when, thanks to new technologies, photography has become the object of an all-reaching exchange, Meiselas’s attitude becomes unprecedented, while her archival projects constitute a valuable precedent. Two of them, the ones devoted to Nicaragua and Kurdistan, are widely represented in this exhibition.

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�The retrospective emphasizes the development of Susan Meiselas’ photographic practice from the1970s onwards. In most of her early work, she addresses the subjects of her portrait-based images by including them in one way or another in the process of her work. In 44 Irving Street, (1972), she asks the persons portrayed to comment on their representation and in Carnival Strippers (1975), a sound recording of the context in which the photographs are taken gives further perspective on the strippers lives. In addition to this aspect, her interest in archival documentation and the compilation of visual histories can also be traced back to this period (Lando, 1975) and one can see this develop in her research work on Kurdistan. Her treatment of images reveals that, in her artistic practice, she considers the photographic frame as a moment in time complementary to other forms of framing and capturing reality, which may be seen and reviewed over time.

� �The exhibition also includes a selection of photographic series that consolidate the role of Meiselas as a pioneer in the critical revisions of documentary photography, a position she shares with artists such as Allan Sekula and Martha Rosler.

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SUSAN MEISELASMEDIATIONS 02 | 06 – 05 | 20 | 2018

The retrospective devoted to the American photographer Susan Meiselas (b. 1948, Baltimore)brings together a selection of works from the 1970s to the present day. A member of Magnum Photos since 1976, Susan Meiselas questions documentary practice. She became known through her work in conflict zones of Central America in the 1970s and 1980s in particular due to the strength of her colour photographs. Covering many subjects and countries, from war to human rights issues and from cultural identity to the sex industry, Meiselas uses photography, film, video and sometimes archive material, as she relentlessly explores and develops narratives integrating the participation of her subjects in her works. The exhibition highlights SusanMeiselas’s unique personal as well as geopolitical approach, showing how she moves through time and conflict and how she constantly questions the photographic process and her role as witness.

Her early works already illustrate her interest for documentary photography. Her very first project,44 Irving Street (1971), was a series of black and white portraits. Here, she used her camera as a means of interacting with the other tenants of the boardinghouse where she lived during her time as a student.For Carnival Strippers (1972-1975), Meiselas followedstrippers working in carnivals in New England over the course of three consecutive summers. The reportage is completed with audio recordings of thewomen, their clients and managers.

From this period originates also Prince Street Girls(1975-1992), which was shot in the district known asLittle Italy, in New York, where Susan Meiselas stilllives. She photographed a group of young girls overseveral years, capturing the changes that took placein their lives as they were growing up, constitutinga chronicle of the evolving relationship between theyoung girls and the photographer.

Three important series represent the center of the exhibition: Nicaragua, El Salvador and Kurdistan. Made between the late 1970s and 2000, the works reveal the way in which the artist challenges and practises photography. During the course of her extensive travels in Latin America, over a number of decades, in times of war and peace, Meiselas returns to the sites where she took the original photographs, using the images to find the people she had met in order to pursue a record of their testimonies. With her project Mediations (1982), Susan Meiselas reveals how the meaning of images changes according to the context

of their diffusion. Her novel approach is almost prophetic in a world where the diffusion of the image is facilitated by technology.

As from 1997, Meiselas addresses each conflict in a different way according to the context. Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History (1997) is an archive of the visual history of a people without a nation. Meiselas,who gathered those elements all around the world in collaboration with Kurdish people, constructed her work as an installation composed of a compilation ofdocuments, photographs and videos.

In 1992, Meiselas, asked to contribute to an awareness campaign exposing domestic violence, began by photographing crime scenes, accompanying a team of police investigators, and then selected a number of documents with photographs from the archives of the San FranciscoPolice Department. This research led her to create Archives of Abuse, collages of police reports and photographs, exhibited in the city’s public spaces asposters on bus shelters.

For the retrospective at the Jeu de Paume, SusanMeiselas has created a new work, begun in 2015, based on her involvement with Multistory, a regional arts organization based in the United Kingdom. This last series A Room of Their Own was made collaboratively in a refuge for women and focuses on domestic violence. The installation includes five narrative video works, featuring Meiselas’s photographs, first-hand testimonies, collages and drawings.

The exhibition of the Jeu de Paume is the most comprehensive retrospective of her work ever heldin France. It retraces her trajectory since the 1970sas a visual artist who associates her subjects to herapproach and questions the status of images inrelation to the context in which they are perceived.

Curators: Carles Guerra and Pia Viewing

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Meiselas’s first major photographic essay focused on the lives of women performing striptease at New England country fairs, whom she photographed during three consecutive summers while teaching photography in New York City public school classrooms. Carnival Strippers was originally published in 1976 with a new edition of the book (which included a CD of the audio recordings) produced by Steidl/Whitney in 2003. In 1976, Meiselas was invited to join the photographic cooperative Magnum Photos. Beginning in 1976, she photographed a group of young girls living in her neighbourhood of Little Italy, New York. Entitled Prince Street Girls, they inspired an on-going relationship.

Meiselas is best known for her coverage of the insurrection in Nicaragua and her documentation of human rights issues in Latin America for over a decade. In 1978 Meiselas made her first trip to Nicaragua, and that year one of her iconic images was published on the cover of the New York Times Magazine. In 1981, she published Nicaragua: June 1978–July 1979, reprinted in 2008 (with a DVD of the film “Pictures from a Revolution”) and in 2016 (with a customize AR app, to trigger film clips from the photographs). Her image of Pablo Jesús Aráuz, the ‘Molotov Man’, made on July 16, 1979 just before the triumph of the Sandinistas, has become an icon of the revolution. The image is shown re-contextualized in the installation The Life of an Image: ‘Molotov Man’, 1979–2009. Meiselas served as an editor for two collaborative projects, both of which support and highlight the work of regional photographers. The first, El Salvador: The Work of Thirty Photographers, Writers and Readers, 1983, also features her own images. The second project, Chile from Within, W. W. Norton, 1991, focuses on work by photographers living under the Pinochet regime. Meiselas has also co-directed four films: Living at Risk: The Story of a Nicaraguan Family,1986 ; Voyages, on her work in Nicaragua produced in collaboration with director M. Karlin, Pictures from a Revolution,1991, with R. P. Rogers and A. Guzzetti; and Reframing History, 2004.

In 1992, Meiselas produced Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History, Random House, 1997 ; University of Chicago Press, 2008. The book was produced along with akaKURDISTAN,1998, an online archive of collective memory, currently shown as a physical map with story books made by contributors from the Kurdish diaspora worldwide. Pandora’s Box, Trebruk/Magnum Editions, 2003, is an exploration of an underground New York S&M club that began in 1995. Both projects are shown as exhibition works.

EncounterswiththeDani, 2003, documents a 60 year visual history of interactions with the Dani, an indigenous people of West Papua, Indonesia. The ICP, New York, produced Meiselas’s retrospective book and exhibition InHistory, Steidl/ICP, 2008.

In 1992, Meiselas was commissioned by the Liz Claiborne Foundation to create an campaign to raise public awareness about domestic violence. The research at the San Francisco Police Department led her to create collages of police reports with the photographic evidence and the work, Archives of Abuse, was installed at bus stops.

In 2015 Meiselas worked with women survivors of domestic abuse in a post-industrial region of the UK. A Room of Their Own, Meiselas’s latest work, a multi-layered, visual story comprised of photographs, first-hand testimonies and collages, is the result of a collaborative process between the women, local artists, Meiselas and Multistory, a non-profit arts organization.

BIOGRAPHY

Susan Meiselas (Baltimore, Maryland, 1948) received her B.A. in 1970, and her Ed.M. in visual education from Harvard University in 1971. Her studio and home are in New York. She has had one-woman exhibitions in Paris, Madrid, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, London, Los Angeles, Chicago and New York, and her work is included in both American and international collections. She has served as a consultant and curator for Open Society Foundations and the Asia Society, has taught courses in Human Rights and Photography at New York University, is a former Professor Extraordinaire for the Masters of Photographic Studies programme in Leiden, Holland.

Portrait of Susan Meiselas, Monimbo, Nicaragua, September 1978 © Alain Dejean Sygma

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THE EXHIBITION

The exhibition, entitled Mediations after an eponymous work, is the most comprehensive retrospective ever held in Europe, bringing together a selection of works from the 1970s to the present day. Mediations (1978–1982) is based on Meiselas’s initial experience during the popular insurrection in Nicaragua. The selection process of her images for the publication Nicaragua:June1978–July1979 and the use of the same photographs by the mass media left her with many questions about how images are used in different contexts. Towards the end of the 1990s, Meiselas started to use archive material that she collected, published and exhibited as part of multimedia installations, thereby giving a voice to individuals and communities subject to violence and oppression.

Susan Meiselas often adopts different approaches to extend her work in various forms: photographic essays, installations, books or films. For example, the documents used in the book Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History (1997) became an online archive of collective memory, akaKURDISTAN (1998), which is currently shown as an on-going project in the form of a “storymap” created by contributors from the global Kurdish diaspora. Working as an editor, she initiated two collaborative projects highlighting the work of regional photographers – El Salvador: The Work of Thirty Photographers (1983) and Chile from Within (1991). The latter focused on work by photographers living under the Pinochet regime. Meiselas has also co-directed four films on Nicaragua: Living at Risk: The Story of a Nicaraguan Family, Voyages (1985), Pictures from a Revolution (1991) and Reframing History (2004) – the last three mentioned are part of this show. This exhibition reveals Meiselas’s unique approach as a photographer who has constantly questioned the status of her images in relation to the context in which they are perceived, showing how she moves through different scales of time and conflict, ranging from the personal to the geopolitical dimension.

EARLY WORKSMeiselas started out in photography by exploring her own immediate surroundings. 44 Irving Street (1971) is a series of photographs of her neighbours in a boarding house where Meiselas lived when she was a graduate student. Each image shows a tenant in a corner of his or her room. Some of the photographs are exhibited with a short text written by the person portrayed. The short narrative reveals how they perceived themselves in these photographs. Meiselas interacts with her subjects to explore, through her images, their

relationship to place. In the Porch Portraits (1974) series, Meiselas explored an area in South Carolina where she taught photography in an elementary school. Stepping across the invisible boundary between the road and the private properties, she took portraits of the people in front of their small wooden houses with open verandas.Following this experience, she developed a community-based project in Lando, an old company-owned mill town, to portray its multi-generational life. This project, the first in which Meiselas compiled an archive with the participation of a community, includes images from family albums and portraits of the inhabitants.Prince Street Girls (1975–1990) was shot over a period of 15 years in Little Italy, New York, a neighbourhood where Meiselas still lives. The young girls (aged 8 to 10 years in 1975) used to hang out on the streets and initially they became a subject of her attention by chance. The photographs show the gradual transformation of their lives and bodies, as they become young women.

CENTRAL AMERICAThe heart of this exhibition is made up of works in which the artist questions the use of the photographic image. Without an assignment of any sort, Meiselas went to Nicaragua in 1978 to cover the popular insurrection following the assassination of the editor of the opposition newspaper La Prensa. “I am not a war photographer in the sense that I didn’t go there for that purpose, explained Meiselas. I’m really interested in how things come about and not just in the surface of what it is.” Over three decades, in times of war and peace, Meiselas returned to the sites

Susan Meiselas, Mississippi.From the series Porch Portraits,1974© Susan Meiselas/Magnum Photos

“It is important to me – in fact, it is central to my work – that I do what I can to respect the individuality of the people I photograph, all of whom exist in specific times and

places.” Susan Meiselas

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where she took the original photographs, using her book Nicaragua:June1978–July1979 (first edition 1981) to find the people she had photographed and record their testimonies, resulting in her third film on Nicaragua, Pictures from a Revolution (1991). The installations Mediations (1978–1982) and Molotov Man (1979–2009) retrace the history of the images she took and the contexts in which they have been published or reappropriated. Some of them became icons of the Nicaraguan revolution. In 2004, she installed large murals of photographs taken during the revolution in the very places where she had captured everyday life during the turmoil. This was a way of questioning the value of the images over time by triggering collective memory. This specific on-site process formed the central theme of the film Reframing History (2004).The El Salvador series (1978–1983) captures the violence of the military dictatorship and the civil war that followed the coup d’état of 1979. It portrays life continuing near the sites of such killings, revealing the on-going tension between the military and the civilian population.

KURDISTANKurdistan (1991–2007) is a multimedia project comprising photographs, videos, documents and oral accounts collected by the artist. This archive of collective memory reveals the history of a people dispersed throughout the world. Meiselas originally arrived in northern Iraq to document Saddam Hussein’s Anfal campaign of genocide against the Kurds launched in 1988. She felt that contemporary photographs could bear witness to a crime by imaging the exhumation of a mass grave of individual remains. The victims, however, were Kurdish citizens from civil society who could only be portrayed through the past century of images that revealed their aspirations for a Kurdish homeland. The installation includes a storymap, to which the accounts from a diaspora Kurdish community are regularly added (through participatory workshops), making each exhibition site-specific.

THE SEX INDUSTRYMeiselas followed strippers working in carnivals in New England over the course of three consecutive summers. Carnival Strippers (1972–1975) is an installation comprising her first major photographic essay and audio recordings of the women, their clients and managers. With a small Leica and no flash, she concentrated on the working lives and the power dynamics of the “girl shows”, portraying them with multiple perspectives, through reportage and portraiture. As she herself said: “These were not just nudes, but real women with personal histories.”Her Pandora’s Box series (1995) was taken in an S&M club in New York and, to a certain degree, it can be thought of as a sequel to Carnival Strippers. She linked the images to the testimonies of the people involved: the manager, the mistresses and the clients. In this small place, she discovered yet another relationship to pain and violence focusing on controlled acts of

violence producing self-inflicted pain. As with most of her projects, a publication was produced before the work was exhibited as an artwork.

DOMESTIC VIOLENCEIn 1992, Meiselas was asked to contribute to an awareness campaign to give greater prominence to growing domestic violence in San Francisco. This led her to create Archives of Abuse, collages of police reports and photographs of crime scenes, exhibited in the city’s public spaces as bus shelter posters. “My instinct, said Meiselas, was to start with the evidence – sometimes found in hotel rooms, sometimes in homes... I recognised the power of absence within these archives of abuse. I imagined the places where things had happened, and discovered the emptiness of the aftermath image. A scar or wound is evidence, but the place itself is only really known to the person on whom the violence was inflicted. It exists in memory.”In 2015, Meiselas worked with women survivors of domestic abuse in a northern post-industrial region of the UK. A Room of Their Own, Meiselas’s latest work, is a multi-layered visual story in which her photographs are combined with testimonies and collages made by the participants in a collaborative process between the women, local artists, Meiselas and Multistory, a non-profit local arts organisation.“In my photographs, each room, like each life, is unique. The image of a space is a record and also a kind of mirror. The woman is absent, yet present. . . . These photographs may serve as a memory of each landscape, at a particular point in time.”

Pia ViewingExhibition curator

Susan Meiselas, Mistresses Solitaire and Delilah II, The Dressing Room. NYC, USA..From the seriesPandora’s Box,1995© Susan Meiselas/Magnum Photos

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CATALOGUESUSAN MEISELAS. MEDIATIONS

RELATED BOOKS

Susan Meiselas Kurdistan, In the Shadow of History The University of Chicago Press1997€49

Susan Meiselas Nicaragua Aperture2016€58

Jeu de Paume Bookshop / www.librairiejeudepaume.org1, place de la Concorde, Paris 8e Tuesday (late-night opening): 11 am - 9 pm Wednesday to Sunday: 11 am - 7 pm / Closed on Mondays +33 (0)1 47 03 12 36 / librairie@jeudepaume.org

Susan Meiselas En première ligne Éditions Xavier Barral2017€35

Texts by Ariella Azoulay, Eduardo Cadava, Carles Guerra, Marianne Hirsch, Corey Keller, Kristen Lubben, Isin Onol and Pia Viewing

Coedition Jeu de Paume / Damiani / Fundació Antoni Tàpies

French, English, Spanish versions

184 pages, €30

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The copyright-free reproduction and display of the following selection of images is permitted solely as part of the promotion of this exhibition at the Jeu de Paume and only while the exhibition is in progress, to the maximum of 3 visuals per media. Any use of more than 3 visuals requires authorization. Please contact annabellefloriant@jeudepaume.org.

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1. Portrait of Susan Meiselas, Monimbo, Nicaragua, September 1978 © Alain Dejean Sygma

2. Susan Meiselas, Sharif and Son.From the series 44 Irving Street,1971© Susan Meiselas/Magnum Photos

3. Susan Meiselas, South Carolina. From the series Porch Portraits, 1974 © Susan Meiselas/Magnum Photos

4. Susan Meiselas, Mississippi.From the series Porch Portraits,1974© Susan Meiselas/Magnum Photos

PRESS VISUALS

Press visuals to download on

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5. Susan Meiselas, Lena after the show,EssexJunction,Vermont, 1973. From the series Carnival Strippers, 1972-1975 © Susan Meiselas/Magnum Photos

6. Susan Meiselas, Debbie and Renee, Rockland, Maine,1972. From the series Carnival Strippers, 1972-1975 © Susan Meiselas/Magnum Photos

7. Susan Meiselas, Lena on the Bally box, Essex Junction, Vermont, 1973. From the series Carnival Strippers, 1972-1975 © Susan Meiselas/Magnum Photos

8. Susan Meiselas, Roseann on the way to Manhatten Beach, New York, 1978. From the series Prince Street Girls,1975-1990© Susan Meiselas/Magnum Photos

9. Susan Meiselas, Dee and Lisa on Mott Street, Little Italy, New York, 1976. From the series Prince Street Girls, 1975-1990 © Susan Meiselas/Magnum Photos

10. Susan Meiselas, Traditional Indian dance mask from the town of Monimbo, adopted by the rebels during the fight against Somoza to conceal identity, Masaya, Nicaragua, 1978. Installation Mediations, 1978-1982 © Susan Meiselas/Magnum Photos

11. Susan Meiselas, Everyone travelling by car, truck, bus or foot is searched, Ciudad Sandino, Nicaragua,1978 © Susan Meiselas/Magnum Photos

12. Susan Meiselas,Sandinistas at the walls of the Esteli National Guard headquarters: “Molotv Man” Estelí, Nicaragua, July 16th 1979 © Susan Meiselas/Magnum Photos

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13. Susan Meiselas, Muchachos await counterattack by the Guard, Matagalpa, Nicaragua, 1978 © Susan Meiselas/Magnum Photos

14. Susan Meiselas, Returning home, Masaya, Nicaragua, 1978 © Susan Meiselas/Magnum Photos

15. Susan Meiselas, Road to Aguilares, El Salvador,1983© Susan Meiselas/Magnum Photos

16. Susan Meiselas, Soldiers search bus passengers along the Northern Highway. El Salvador,1980 © Susan Meiselas/Magnum Photos

17. Susan Meiselas, Widow at mass grave found in Koreme, Northern Iraq, 1992 © Susan Meiselas/Magnum Photos

18. Susan Meiselas, Concrete blocks mark the mass grave in Koreme, Northern Iraq, 1992 © Susan Meiselas/Magnum Photos

19. Susan Meiselas, Mistresses Solitaire and Delilah II, The Dressing Room. NYC, USA.From the series Pandora’s Box,1995© Susan Meiselas/Magnum Photos

20. Susan Meiselas, Janet.From the project A Room Of Their Own, 2015-2017 © Susan Meiselas/Magnum Photos

OPENING TIMESTuesday(late-night opening): 111 am–9 pm

Wednesday to Sunday: 11 am–7 pm / Closed on Mondays

ADMISSIONPlein tarif: 10€

Tarif réduit: 7,50€

PRESS VISUALSCopyright-free visuals can be downloaded www.jeudepaume.org

Homepage : Press • Username : presskit / Password: photos

CONTACTSPress : Annabelle Floriant

01 47 03 13 22 / 06 42 53 04 07 / annabellefloriant@jeudepaume.orgCommunication : Anne Racine

01 47 03 13 29 / anneracine@jeudepaume.org

Due to its content, one of the rooms in the exhibition is forbidden to people under the age of 18.

Other artworks may also upset the sensibilities of visitors, younger audiences in particular.

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