Susan Meiselas : Nicaragua, Histoire, Mémoire

Images live their lives independently of those who create them. It was in Nicaragua that Susan Meiselas came to understand this. In 1978, the photographer, then just 30 years old, traveled there for the first time. She had previously studied visual education at Harvard University, published a widely acclaimed first book on carnival strippers, and joined Magnum Photos. In this Central American country, the Marxist-inspired insurrection was turning into a revolutionary war pitting the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) against the National Guard of President Anastasio Somoza Debayle’s dictatorial regime supported by the United States. During several stays, she photographed military drills, street fighting, and the victory of the Revolution. In 1981, a first selection of these historical documents was published in a volume soberly titled Nicaragua, June 1978-July 1979.

Since that publication, Susan Meiselas has continued to document the country’s political destiny by returning regularly. Each time, she made a point of recording the use made of her images reproduced on various artifacts (T-shirts, stamps, matchboxes, etc.) or murals, most often in praise of the Revolution, but also, at times, to criticize or combat it. She observed that her photographs had taken on an autonomous existence. Over time, a significant gap emerged between what her images documented and what they symbolized in the collective imagination. Susan Meiselas’s photographs thus became the very site of a tension between History and Memory. It is precisely this dialectic that the exhibition at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson and the accompanying book set out to explore through more than a hundred works, documents, and film clips.

Curatorship

Clément Chéroux, director of the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson