[Leica] North Carolina (and nearby) LUGgers: Susan Meiselas at Duke on Weds 3/24 at 7pm

[aaron.sandler at duke.edu (Aaron Sandler)]

Friends of the Carolinas,

On Wednesday March 24, acclaimed Magnum photographer Susan Meiselas' 
exhibit "Prince Street Girls" will open at Duke with an artist's talk and 
reception.

If anyone wants to meet up at the reception, or even for a drink before or 
after, this might be a nice chance to put some faces with some names.

Perhaps we could even call it the inaugural meeting of the CaroLUG...anyone 
interested?

Best from Durham,
Aaron

>THE DOCUMENTARY IMAGINATION
>Spring 2004 Speaker Series
>
>Wednesday, March 24, 7 p.m.
>Susan Meiselas
>John Hope Franklin Center, Duke University
>In conjunction with the exhibition Susan Meiselas: Prince Street Girls, 
>presented by the John Hope Franklin Center for Interdisciplinary and 
>International Studies from March 24 through May 7
>Artist Talk: March 24, 7 p.m., Room 240, Franklin Center, 2204 Erwin Road, 
>Duke University
>Opening Reception: 8:30-10:00 p.m.
>(Free parking available in Pickens Clinic lot, across from the main 
>entrance of the Franklin Center on Trent Drive)
>
>The series The Documentary Imagination is 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. Prince Street Girls is
>
>UPCOMING SPEAKER
>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.
>
>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 in 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).

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