Eli Kirk Price Room
Main Building
For over four decades, Susan Meiselas has used photography to interrogate war, human rights, and social structures, producing compelling visual stories informed by the enduring relationships she builds with her subjects. In this lecture, Meiselas will discuss her documentary practice, including her groundbreaking series, Carnival Strippers (1972-1975), for which she traveled with fairs and carnivals across New England, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina photographing and interviewing striptease performers, their managers, and audience members. Photographs from this series are on view in the exhibition Transformations: American Photographs from the 1970s.
Things to Know:
- This is a hybrid program. You can register either for the in-person event or register to watch it live via Zoom.
- There will be time for a Q&A at the end of the program.
- The program will be recorded. A link to the recording will be sent to everyone who registers for the virtual component of the program.
About the speaker:
Susan Meiselas is a documentary photographer based in New York. She is the author of Carnival Strippers (1976), Nicaragua (1981), Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History (1997), Pandora’s Box (2001), Encounters with the Dani (2003), Prince Street Girls (2016), A Room of Their Own (2017), Tar Beach (2020) and Carnival Strippers Revisited (2022). Meiselas is well known for her documentation of human rights issues in Latin America. Her photographs are included in North American and international collections. In 1992 she was made a MacArthur Fellow and received a Guggenheim Fellowship (2015). Most recently, she received the first Women in Motion Award from Kering and the Rencontres d’Arles (2019), the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize (2019), and the Erich Salomon Award of the German Society for Photography (2022). Mediations, a survey exhibition of her work from the 1970s to present was initiated by Jeu de Paume and traveled to Fundació Antoni Tàpies,San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Instituto Moreira Salles in São Paulo, among others. Meiselas has been the President of the Magnum Foundation since 2007, with a mission to expand diversity and creativity in documentary photography. She is also a co-author of the book, Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography, published by Thames & Hudson in 2024.
The program is closed captioned. Contact publicprograms@philamuseum.org regarding other accommodation requests.