Mediations & Collaborations: A Conversation with Susan Meiselas
Mediations & Collaborations: A Conversation with Susan Meiselas
Monday, September 10, 2018
12:00-1:30pm
Geballe Room, Townsend Center for the Humanities
Please enjoy the event summary here and the podcast on our SoundCloud channel here.
Co-sponsored by the Arts Research Center and the University of California Humanities Research Institute, the Center for Latin American Studies, and the Townsend Center for the Humanities
From war and human rights to cultural identity and domestic violence, Susan Meiselas’s award-winning photographic work covers a wide range of subjects and countries. Meiselas received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College and her MA in visual education from Harvard University. A member of the internationally renowned photographic cooperative, Magnum Photos since 1976, Meiselas creates work that raises provocative questions about documentary practice, and the relationship between photographer and subject. Meiselas’s retrospective, Mediations, on view at SFMOMA until October 21, features projects from the beginning of her career in the 1970s to the present day, including her iconic portraits of carnival strippers and Prince Street girls, vivid color images of the revolutions in Central America in the 1980s, collaborations with survivors of domestic violence, and an ongoing investigation into the history and aftermath of the Kurdish genocide.
In conversation with Natalia Brizuela (Film and Media, Spanish and Portuguese) and Leigh Raiford (African American Studies), Meiselas will discuss her photographic practice, intersectional feminism in photographic image-making, and the continued importance of photojournalism in a changing technological and geopolitical landscape.
ARC’s 2018-19 program is a collaboration between ARC Interim Director Natalia Brizuela (Film & Media and Spanish & Portuguese), Tarek Elhaik (Anthropology, UC Davis), Anneka Lenssen (History of Art), Leigh Raiford (African American Studies), and Poulomi Saha (English), supported by a generous grant from The University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI).
The year’s investigations on art and critique from/in the Global South will take off with a Workshop in Mexico City (September 6-8), co-convened by Natalia Brizuela and Elena Tzelepis (University of Thessaly, Volos, Greece), organized through the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs (ICCTP) with the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The Mexico City workshop will take place at the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) at the UNAM. More details on the Mexico City workshop can be found here.
This project was supported in part by the University of California Office of the President MRPI funding MR-15-328710.
Image Credit: Susan Meiselas, Road to Aguilares, El Salvador, 1983; © Susan Meiselas/Magnum Photos