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In History
Edited by Kristen Lubben. Text by Susan Meiselas, Caroline Brothers, Edmundo Desnoes, Ariel Dorfman, Elizabeth Edwards and David Levi Strauss.
Steidl/ICP,
2008.
246 pp.,
200 color illustrations.,
7x9¾".
Publisher's Description
Since the 1970s, questions of ethics raised by documentary practice have been central to debates
in photography. Perhaps no other photographer has so closely and consistently represented and
participated in these debates than Susan Meiselas. An American photographer best known for
her work covering the political upheavals in Central America in the 1970s and 80s—including the
El Mozote massacre in El Salvador—Meiselas’ process has evolved in radical and challenging ways
as she has grappled with essential questions about her relationship to her subjects, the use and
circulation of her images in the media and the relationship of images to history and memory.
Meiselas is under no illusions about the dual nature of the photographer’s role as witness: “The
camera is an excuse to be someplace you otherwise don’t belong. It gives me both a point of connection
and a point of separation.” Her tenacious engagement with these matters has made her a
leading commentator in the debate on contemporary photojournalism. With 200 plates and contributions
from some of photography’s finest theorists—among them David Levi Strauss, Lucy
Lippard, Kristen Lubben, Jan-Erik Lundstrom and Allan Sekula—this volume gives an overview of
Meiselas’ enormously varied and courageous work to date.
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