Susan Meiselas Bücher

In her most recent body of work, acclaimed photographer Susan Meiselas pieces together verbal and visual traces of encounters with the Dani--an indigenous people of the West Papuan highlands--from the nearly six decades since their "discovery" by the West. In this subjective, fragmentary history, Meiselas draws from the experiences of missionaries, colonists, anthropologists and modern-day ecotourists, all of whom have come to the Dani's Baliem Valley and transformed the conditions under which they live. The ambiguous relations between power and representation--whether in the form of Dutch colonial patrol notes from the 1930s, the sensationalized media accounts of the survivors of a downed U.S. army plane in "Shangri-La" from the 1940s or a tourist's snapshots from the 1990s--become visible in Meiselas's book, through both the contradictions and unexpected continuities of the gathered materials.

A radical new history of photography from a team of esteemed writers and thinkers that focuses on the complex collaborations between photographer and subject.

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 "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.