The books “Chile from within” and “El Salvador: the work of
thirty photographers” were edited by Susan Meiselas (REFERENCE). These pieces I
have highlighted, because they mark a start to a new way of documenting
subjects. Instead of going into an area, building up trust and creating a piece
of work, Meiselas edits the work of people actual living in the locations to
create a piece which will raise awareness to their plight. This could be seen
as a more accurate representation of the subject, as the sufferers give their
descriptions (photographically) of a situation which is affecting them. They
have more involvement and perhaps more to say about a situation than an outside
(Measles) coming in, making images, and eventually leaving. The situation in “Chile
from within” also takes place on a larger time span, and occurred in the past,
so Meiselas couldn’t create a full story out of her own images. To use other
peoples images from the times creates a more accurate account.
Another piece of Susan Meiselas that I looked at was
archives of abuse. As well as being an interesting piece of work, it again
raises various questions and responses to the genre of documentary photography.
As with the previous works, she works in a genre as well as questioning it at
the same time, which is very sophisticated and something to admire.
The work was part of a collaborative piece named Women’s
work, commissioned by Liz Claiborne foundation. The collaborative work was a
public arts project meant to highlight the issue of domestic abuse. The project
also set up a crisis telephone line which was aimed at assisting the victims of
domestic abuse. Meiselas originally intended to photograph actual victims of
domestic abuse with cooperation of the police, but was denied actually
accompanying them. Instead, she used existing police documents and statistics
(which she did acquire with the cooperation of the San Francisco police department)
to tell the stories in more accuracy than the proposed images which Meiselas
would have made could suggest (REFERENCE)
The work was installed in bus shelters around san Francisco
in 1992, (REFERENCE, IMAGE) and later published under the title of “archives of
abuse.” the work is quite disturbing when we see that the images and reports
are real, and are actually documents. They are proof of something happening,
and thus create a powerful body of work.
This leads on to her
work concerning Kurdistan.
“In the 1990s, after
seeing the exhumation of mass graves in northern Iraq, the result of Saddam
Hussein's genocidal campaign against the Kurds in 1987 and 1988, she began to
gather every scrap of visual evidence—documents, family pictures, maps,
personal stories—to build a public archive of the history of the displaced
Kurdish people. From a book project and an exhibition, it developed into a
website, akaKurdistan.com, an
expanding visual memory bank driven by the momentum of its contributors.”
(REFERENCE)
Meiselas spent six years collecting information (texts,
photographs) to create a body of work. In her own words, “images and texts from
their past that might shed light on the present” were used to create an
identity for a race of people whose home is spread across several countries and
had at the time been suffering an attempted genocide. (REFERENCE) Their
identity was at risk of being destroyed. And so the book (and eventually
website) Meiselas worked on become a home for their identity. If the Kurds were
to be wiped out and/or driven from their homes, then there would still be a
home for their identity.
Meiselas is not a photographer for this piece. She is simply
a collector and editor. A term I came across often whilst researching this book
was that it created a “collective memory” of the Kurds, as there are no official
national archives for them, as Kurdistan is not a state, it is a region. They
technically aren’t a nation. The website is quite powerful, as the description
describes it as a “borderless space” which “provides the opportunity to build a
collective memory.” (REFERENCE)This
piece is perhaps more dynamic than the Nicaragua, as it is still growing, and
could possibly go on for many years as the Kurds are still a race without a
country. akaKurdistan is constantly
evolving, defining the nation and keeping it defined rather than letting it
fade away.
But what significance
does this have within the documentary genre? Similar to the pieces in Chile/ El
Salvador, Meiselas isn’t getting involved with people from the culture, gaining
some degree of trust, and then making a short collection of images taken within
a short space of time to summarise them. She pulls images from a variety of
sources to create a large collection of imagery and text which summaries the culture/race
and that is perhaps a much more accurate and reliable telling of the culture
than one Meiselas could provide on her own. After all, how could one person
summarise a whole culture accurately without an incredible amount of material
and sources. And even then, to create a summary on her own (and call it her
own) would indicate some bias and be reliant on her own knowledge and
interpretation of the situation. Meiselas has narrowed her practise down to
being very accurate and reliable to the subjects concerned rather than making
pictures with a distinct style and artistic impetus that she could create.
Although this piece of work may not be referred to as a piece of documentary
photography by Susan Meiselas, she gives photographs (which may or may not have
already been documents) a new significance as documents in a new context. She
has created a documentary piece, in many ways absent of any style, which
therefore makes it accurate and valid as documentary work.
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