Photopaper
Issue 33 / 34
Porch Portraits – South Carolina & Mississippi 1974
Susan Meiselas
Kasseler Fotografie Festival
English
Softcover
16 Pages
210 x 290 mm
2018
ISBN Not Available
I would drive down a road, see a house, stop my car and hope that someone would open their door. I hadn’t planned what I would say. I began by explaining that I was teaching photography in the local elementary school, that I came from the North, and would like to take their photo. I didn’t really know why. As my work has evolved, it’s rarely been focused on portraits. Portraits usually aren’t an expression of a sustained relationship. I often find them to be awkward and tense encounters. Now, from a distance of more than 40 years, there are so many more questions that I wish I had asked, but maybe didn’t feel that I could. These photographs come from a time when tenderness was still possible. We could see each other, if only for a moment. Each exchange led me to make a picture and when I returned home I sent every family a print in the form of an enlarged postcard. That process was most important to me. They had welcomed me to trespass. The postcard was simply a gesture to acknowledge that crossing we shared. I wonder now how their lives have evolved. Looking back at myself as a young white woman making this work leads me to rethink my own connection to the history of the South, which I knew so little about then.
(source: https://photopaper.world/portfolio-item/33-34-susan-meiselas/)
About the Artist
Susan Meiselas, born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1948, published her first major photographic essay in 1976. Carnival Strippers focused on the lives of women doing striptease at New England country fairs. Meiselas joined Magnum Photos in 1976. She is best known for her coverage of the insurrection in Nicaragua and her documentation of human rights issues in Latin America. She published her second monograph, Nicaragua, in 1981. Meiselas completed a six-year project curating a hundred-year photographic history of Kurdistan, integrating her own work into the book Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History and developing akaKurdistan, an online site of exchange for collective memories in 1998. Her monograph Pandora’s Box explores a New York S&M club, has been exhibited both at home and abroad. Encounters with the Dani reveals a sixty-year history of discovery and interactions with outsiders, the Dani, an indigenous people in the highlands of Papua in Indonesia. Meiselas has had one-woman exhibitions in Paris, Madrid, Amsterdam, London, Los Angeles, Chicago and New York, and her work is included in collections around the world. She has received numerous awards since 1979 and was named a MacArthur Fellow in 1992.
susanmeiselas.com
(source: https://photopaper.world/portfolio-item/33-34-susan-meiselas/)
About the Journal
PHOTOPAPER is a new kind of monographic photo publication with a continuously changing editorial team of international experts. These guest editors name photographers or photographic projects which they would like to present to an international public. PHOTOPAPER features this work in single monographic issues of 16 or 32 pages. The main idea is to make high-quality printed photographic work accessible to as many people as possible by producing the final publication at a reasonable price. Therefore, the production process is reduced to a minimum while at the same time using high-end printing technology and a nice paper. Published on a quarterly basis.
photopaper.world
(source: https://photopaper.world/about/)
About the Publisher
The Fotobookfestival Kassel is a charitable foundation that has been engaged with the artistic medium of the photobook and has presented it in all its facets, since 2008, in a festival program of international standing. The annual festival shows works by renowned artists and promotes established and emerging talents, publishers, designers, printers, curators and booksellers on an international platform. It was the first festival of its kind dedicated to the photographic book and has founded two novel book awards: The KASSEL DUMMY AWARD for the best photobook mock-up of the year has awarded emerging talents a complete photobook-production since 2010; the KASSEL PHOTOBOOK AWARD assembles the best photobooks of the previous year nominated by international experts in the field. Books entered for both awards are showcased regularly in travelling exhibitions at international festivals and photography events. These two awards are unique in their formats and have been role models for other international festivals and events.
fotobookfestival.org
(source: https://fotobookfestival.org/fotobookfestival-kassel/)
