Susan Meiselas

The re-issue of Learn to See: A Sourcebook of Photography Projects by Students and Teachers (Polaroid Foundation, 1974), a publication conceived when Susan Meiselas was a teacher in Bronx public schools in New York.
With the participation of other educators, artists and researchers, she created a tool dedicated to experimentation and learning through images. In a series of 101 playful exercises, the book progressively explores the basics of photographic language and, through stagings show more reflecting the daily life of the time, highlights the gaze of children from underprivileged neighborhoods of New York, South Carolina or Mississippi.

Learn to See not only takes us back to the origins of Meiselas’ collaborative work and uninterrupted engagement with communities, but also seeks to inspire image makers and push them to explore new forms of interactions with our environment.

Learn to See is at the origin of the book Eyes Open, 23 photographic ideas for curious kids, published this year and available in bookstores.

The reissue is limited to 500 copies show less

Published in 1981, Susan Meiselas' Nicaragua is a modern classic--a seminal contribution to the literature of concerned photojournalism. John Berger praised the work for its ability to, "take us right inside a revolutionary moment... Yet unlike most photographs of such material, these refuse all the rhetoric normally associated with such pictures: The rhetoric of violence, revolutionary heroism and the glorification of misery." Nicaragua forms an extraordinary narrative of a nation in show more turmoil. Starting with a powerful and chilling evocation of the Somoza regime during its decline in the late 1970s, the images trace the evolution of the popular resistance that led to the insurrection, culminating with the triumph of the Sandinista revolution in 1979. The 2008 edition includes Pictures from a Revolution, a DVD in which Meiselas returns to the scenes she originally photographed, tirelessly tracking down the subjects and interviewing them about the reality of post-revolution Nicaragua. The DVD booklet features a new interview with Meiselas in which she discusses the history of the project.
Susan Meiselas, born in Baltimore in 1948, received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College and her MA from Harvard University. Her first book, the classic Carnival Strippers, was published in 1976. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Hasselblad Foundation Photography Prize (1994) and the International Center of Photography's Infinity Award (2005). Her work has been exhibited at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Art Institute of Chicago. A member of Magnum Photos, Meiselas was named a MacArthur Fellow in 1992. She lives in New York. show less

"I went into a period where I felt as if every time I was photographing something or someone, I was thinking about that moment when they would no longer be there" (21).