Susan Meiselas exhibition in Paris examines history, memory, and the circulation of images

PARIS.- This exhibition is the first to approach the Nicaragua series from the original angle of the life of images—their circulation, their transformation, and their collective appropriation.

It brings together more than a hundred works and objects, including previously unseen photographs, never before exhibited or published.

To extend this reflection on the perception of historical fact through the image, four contemporary artistic contributions—by Alfredo Jaar, Arno Fischer & Peter Voigt, Joy Garnett, and Gabriel Pérez-Setright—will present works in dialogue with Meiselas's oeuvre.

Susan Meiselas is the 2025 laureate of the Henri Cartier-Bresson Lifetime Achievement Award.

Born in 1948 in Baltimore, United States, Susan Meiselas lives and works in New York.

In 1976, she was among the very few women invited to join the Magnum Photos agency. Her series Carnival Strippers (1972–1975), devoted to striptease at state fairs, had already revealed the singular nature of her approach.

This founding project laid the groundwork for a body of work built over time and through collaboration. Susan Meiselas brings her subjects' voices to the fore, working across sound, text, film, and photography.

It was her work in Central American conflict zones (1978–1983), particularly in Nicaragua, that brought her international recognition.

Her work has since spanned a vast geographical and thematic scope, from human rights to cultural identity, and from war to the sex industry.

She has received some of the most prestigious awards in photography, including the MacArthur Fellowship (1992), the Hasselblad Foundation Award (1994), the Guggenheim Fellowship (2015), the Women in Motion Prize awarded by Kering in partnership with the Rencontres d'Arles (2019), the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Center of Photography (2025), and the Henri Cartier-Bresson Lifetime Achievement Award (2025).

Images live their own lives, independent of those who create them. It was in Nicaragua that Susan Meiselas came to understand this. In 1978, the photographer, just 30 years old, traveled there for the first time. She had previously studied visual education at Harvard University, published a highly acclaimed first book on striptease shows, and joined the Magnum Photos agency.

In this Central American country, a popular uprising was transforming into a revolutionary war pitting the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) against the National Guard of the dictatorial regime of President Anastasio Somoza Debayle, backed by the United States. Over the course of several stays, she photographed daily life, street fighting, and the victory of the Revolution. In 1981, a first selection of these historically significant documents was published in a book simply titled Nicaragua, June 1978 – July 1979.

Following this publication, Susan Meiselas felt compelled to return to Nicaragua to speak with those who appeared in her images. Over the past four decades, she has returned there frequently, documenting how her photographs were being used—reproduced on various objects (T-shirts, stamps, matchboxes, etc.) or as murals, most often in celebration of the Revolution, but sometimes also to criticize or oppose it.

She came to realize that her photographs had acquired a life of their own. Over time, a significant gap had emerged between what they documented and what they had come to symbolize in the collective imagination. Susan Meiselas's images thus became the very site of a tension between History and Memory.

It is precisely this dialectic that the exhibition at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, along with its accompanying publication by Atelier EXB, sets out to explore through more than a hundred works, documents, and film clips.

Exhibition Curator

Clément Chéroux
Director of the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson