This conversation between renowned Magnum photographer Susan Meiselas and theorist of photography Eduardo Cadava will explore the relations among photography, documentation, representation, history, and violence. Taking its point of departure from Cadava’s recent book, Paper Graveyards, published by MIT Press, which includes a letter to Meiselas, the discussion will focus on what photography can do in moments of crisis, war, and danger of all kinds. In doing so, it will touch on the long and rich trajectory of Meiselas’s photographic work, from the 1970s to the present.
BIOGRAPHIES
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 travelled to Fundació Antoni Tàpies, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Instituto Moreira Salles in São Paulo, along with other European venues. Meiselas has been the President of the Magnum Foundation since 2007, with a mission to expand diversity and creativity in documentary photography.
EDUARDO CADAVA is Philip Mayhew Professor of English at Princeton University. He is the author of Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History, Emerson and the Climates of History, Paper Graveyards, and, with Sara Nadal-Melsió, Politically Red. He has co-edited Who Comes After the Subject?, Cities Without Citizens, and The Itinerant Languages of Photography. He also has introduced and co-translated, with Liana Theodoratou, Nadar’s memoirs, Quand j’étais photographe, which appeared under the title When I Was a Photographer, and has curated installations and exhibitions at the MAXXI Museum, the Slought Foundation, Storefront for Art and Architecture, the Al-Ma’mal Center for Contemporary Art, and the Princeton University Art Museum. He is co-directing, with Eyal Weizman, a multiyear project on the relation between political conflict and climate change titled Conflict Shorelines that includes fieldwork in Amazonia, the Negev desert, and the Arctic, and collaborating with Fazal Sheikh on a project titled Exposure that is documenting the ruination of the Utah landscape by uranium mining and oil and gas drilling and the consequences of this ruination on native communities.
CO-ORGANIZED
Organised by EMΣΤ | National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens in collaboration with the Athens Photo Festival
