Mediations

‘Mediations’ by the American photographer Susan Meiselas proposes a selection of works from the 1970s to today, revealing Meiselas’s special approach to the underlying reasons for making photographs, how the image concerns its subject as much as the photographer and the role that these images can have at different levels in society and particularly in photojournalism.

She questions the relationship between the image and the subject in such a way as to include the people portrayed in the image in the image-making process. There is nothing systematic in her approach: each work expresses in a very strong manner the notion that context is vital to the understanding of photography. Therefore, her work is specific to the persons portrayed, to the notion of community to which they belong and to the geographic and political localities that the artist explores. The way of showing the work is equally a part of the thought process. How does the spectator behold the artwork? It often comprises many parts, made in different media: each “layer” is used to document a level of meaning. For Meiselas, one should be able to grasp why the image was taken. Both the subject of the image and the context in which the images are shown are taken into account in the elaboration of each project.