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| Photo by Jacob Kriese |
| Photojournalist Susan Meiselas showed her work to a crowd at Woodburn Hall Wednesday evening. Much of her work documents the Nicaraguan revolution and its aftermath. |
Meiselas was invited to campus by Jeffrey Wolin of the School of Fine Arts, but the audience included about a dozen photojournalism students and a half dozen working photojournalists from Bloomington and Indianapolis. Professors Jim Kelly and Claude Cookman joined Wolin and Meiselas for a conversation about photojournalism following the presentation.
Her approach to photography is far more anthropological in approach than is typical among photojournalists, according to Kelly. For example, she initially covered the Nicaraguan revolution in the late 1970s for a number of international publications, including The New York Times Magazine, but did not quit the story after the news event was over. Many of her images from the war were published in her 1981 book, Nicaragua, June 1978-July 1979.
Intrigued by what her photos meant not just to foreign audiences, but also to those Nicaraguans who actually lived the revolution, she returned a few years later and co-directed two films, Living at Risk: The Story of a Nicaraguan Family (1986) and Pictures from a Revolution (1991), that examined the impact the revolution and Meiselas’ photos.
In 2004, Meiselas returned yet again and installed 19 mural-sized photographs from 1979 on public walls and open spaces in collaboration with local communities to create "sites for collective memory." Out of this grew a Web site and project called "Reframing History," intended "to be a link between those who lived through the dramatic time of revolution and those too young to recall it, bridging generations in Nicaragua and reframing the dialogue between them."
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