The exhibition Mediations is the first retrospective in Germany of the Magnum photographer’s over 50-year oeuvre—from her early portraits of neighbors to intimate shots of strippers to her iconic photographs from crisis and war zones.
The American photographer’s works, many of them long-term studies, cover a broad range of themes and countries and draw attention to minorities and conflicts that are often overlooked by the global public. Today, Meiselas is considered to have paved the way not only for politically engaged photographers who carefully document, reflect on, and contextualize their work, but also for photographers who work collaboratively with their subjects.
To this day, Susan Meiselas seeks direct contact and dialogue with the people she portrays. Her approach is collaborative and includes her subjects’ perspectives. She carries out visual field studies, sometimes over periods of many years, in which photographs seldom stand alone. Instead, they appear alongside interviews, sound recordings, videos, archival material, and notes. These collages not only reveal the underlying contexts of the images, they also invite reflection on the photographic practice itself, on bearing witness, on the hierarchies in the photographic act, and on the reception and dissemination of images.
With Mediations, C/O Berlin presents the largest retrospective of her work ever shown in Germany. The exhibition includes around 250 photographs and video installations from the 1970s to the present day. The book Carnival Strippers Revisited, published by Steidl Verlag, has been released in tandem with the exhibition. Curated by Felix Hoffmann, C/O Berlin Foundation.
