1˚ Fórum Latino-americano de Fotografia de São Paulo Entrevista

1˚ Fórum Latino-americano de Fotografia de São Paulo
Entrevista Susan Meiselas
Iatã Cannabrava: Vou direto à apresentação. Susan Meiselas,
fotógrafa independente, nasceu e mora nos EUA, é formada em
artes pela Universidade de Harvard. É uma das mais importantes
fotógrafas do mundo, seu principal foco de interesse são as mulheres
e os conflitos da América Latina e do Terceiro Mundo, que fotografa
desde os anos 1970. Meiselas passou uma década trabalhando em
diversos países da América Latina, principalmente Nicarágua, El
Salvador, Chile e Colômbia. É uma latino-americana como nós. Para
entrevistá-la, convidamos de novo nossa dupla dinâmica de
entrevistadores oficiais do 1˚ Fórum Latino-americano de Fotografia:
Simonetta Persichetti, jornalista, crítica de fotografia, docente
universitária; e Ricardo Mendes, pesquisador, escritor e criador do
site Fotoplus. Vocês tem que navegar pelo site do Ricardo Mendes.
É um banco de dados fenomenal. É melhor que o Google para achar
informações sobre fotografia. É um site excelente. E como
entrevistador surpresa, hoje, temos nosso colaborador Marcelo
Brodsky, fotógrafo argentino que tem seu trabalho diretamente
relacionado com o período da repressão e da ditadura na Argentina,
destacando-se aí seu libro Buena Memoria. Não foi à toa que
convidamos o Marcelo Brodsky para ser entrevistador surpresa da
mesa. Susan, por favor.
Susan Meiselas: I really didn't know where to begin because in a
sense I wanted to begin where I began. I show you a small series of
photos that have never been published and practically never seen. I
call them The Porche Series because for me they register the
psychology of fear. Trespassing, entering someone else's space to
make the object, the photograph. I'm interested in the object, the
aesthetic of it framed and also maybe the point of departure as a
photographer in engagement and what the relationship of the
photograph is to that exchange.
So these are very early photographs, maybe 1972 or 1973, in which I
never passed the porche. I'm driving down the road, I see a house
and I have to explain myself why do I want to make this picture and
who is it for. It wasn't so clear so all I did was made these
photographs and send them back to people as postcards. I think they
register a stage, the first stage of trying to understand the power of
the camera. When I was putting these photographs together I thought
about this one because it's the transition from being on the outside to
be able to begin to go into the inside of something.
Then I show you these photos that were taken in New England in the
same years in which I came across something called The Girl Show,
which was a traveling show from town to town. I started in the
fairground of the carnivals and then I progressively entered the space
in the dressing room...
I'm going to show you a short clip: I was taking sound of the
participants (the managers, the clients, the girls...) and at the same
time taking photographs.
[they show the clip she mentioned]
I think it's important to say that even in this very beginning period in
the seventies I was making photographs, but I really felt they were my
photographs so the counter point would be their voices reporting their
lives, their perspectives. That full range, from those who owned the
shows to those who paid.
As you can see I go through the dressing room from the fairground to
the tent and to be in the back of the tent I had to dress like a man in
order to get the photographs where the girls were performing
because it was an only men space. I included a few of these portraits
because I never think of myself doing portraits but it's what they
wanted. They would see the contact sheets each week I would come
back from the fair, from one place to another and they would see the
contact sheets but what they wanted were portraits to give away.
That's why I made portraits.
It's a kind of leap, it may not make sense, of course there are some
projects in between but they were not completed.
Some around New York in my own neighborhood...
And then I read about Nicaragua. It was in 1978. I went there before
the popular insurrection, I read about the dictatorship of Somoza in
power for fifty years supported by the United States. One ring, what is
happening and not seen in any picture. We live now in a time of so
many pictures but in 1978 you would read about Nicaragua but not
see Nicaragua, so I felt I had to go to see and understand what was
happening there. So these photographs are all taken within one year,
practically the whole year stage. The insurrection began two months
after I arrived.
Now I show you a photograph, I know it's a difficult one, it was a kind
of essential one for me. I don't know how old everyone is in the
audience but reading about the disappeared in the seventies in Chile,
Argentina, being an american, it was even difficult to comprehend
what was happening. So that photograph was my really first
encounter with what it meant to be disappeared.
I've joined Magnum with my portfolio of strippers, Nicaragua was the
first place where I was reporting and sending my photos back to New
York, where they were edited and distributed by Magnum. That was
really a shift. No one teaches you how to cover a war but suddenly
you are in the middle of one and I guess you take it as you can.
Somoza bombed five towns, many people disappeared and the
population really rose up and fought against him.
This was a switch, I think I have done some color before. Many times
people talk about being a colorist as a photographer, some people
stay with one medium, I shifted between one that feels right to be
photographed in black and white or in color. Now if it's film, or digital,
or video. I think it really relates to the subject and what I try to
capture.
Watching the use of photographs, I show you the New York Times
first cover in the magazine for me. It's also remarkable the
nicaraguans used that photograph to be a tourist poster for the town
where the photograph was taken in. When I stayed in Central
America, between 1980 and 1982, I developed this notion of witness.
It became very powerful, again a different stage in a way to
understand the necessity to witness, to document, that was what one
had to do.
Here's a photograph of the Mozote massacre [El Salvador, December
10th to 12th, 1981] which took ten years to prove that what they said
happened in Mazote, the killing of over a thousand people, had in fact
happened. So this period was a shift to me, to not think of publishing
only the work I did in that three/four years period but to create a
collective testimony. In fact El Salvador book was the first and then in
Chile I went there and worked with a number of chilean
photographers and I didn't bring my own photographs to this book. I
mean they had lived the fifteen years of Pinochet and I was really
coming and going so I only wanted to facilitate their way of seeing to
the world I came from.
At the end of the eighties I went back to Nicaragua to make a clip
where I tried to find out what happened to the people I photographed
before. I came back to those places with the book in my hand,
showing it and asking people if they knew the persons portrayed.
When I was lucky to find one, I talked with them about those war
days, recording their testimony and trying to understand what
happened during those ten years.
[they show the clip she mentioned]
I tried to tell three narratives: the narrative of time, the narrative of
photographs, the narrative of the time in between the photographs
and the making of the film of ten years, the counter war and what
happened. I think the photographs are a constant point of reference
in time, for your own relationship to the images you make and for the
people who are in the images. I’m interested in those two points of
reference continuing to use them as I kind of interrogation.
I finished the film about Nicaragua in 1991, just when the Gulf War
started. When Kurds rose up against Saddam they were decimated
so I decided to go to Iraq. I missed the hundred eighty thousands
Kurds flood from Iraq into Turkey and to Iran. So I went into Iran and
crossed back into northern Iraq to find out what it happened there.
We had heard about what happened to Kurds with Saddam, we all
now know but at the time Saddam was still very much in power. His
troops retreated to Bagdad after destroying many small villages
(nearly 4000) and decimating the Kurd population. It's curious to jump
back to those photos and thinking about that fifteen years after the
massacres, my pictures were used to accuse Saddam. We heard the
stories of the violences and the executions during the dictatorship,
the survivors came back to those craves and started to collect
everything that could be an evidence against the dictator. This is
quite different than when you're photographing what is before you. In
fact, the only people interested in that work was Human Rights Watch
at the time. I guess my own perspective began to shift in this work.
There was no magical place to publish it other than Human Rights
Watch. The New York Times published something only three or four
years after. What really began to happen in this intermediary time is
this feeling that I was making photographs that had a very different
kind of function, they were documenting something that had
happened in the past rather than the present as you saw in El
Salvador. I started to feel that my photographs were so important for
people, that they were telling a story unknown. I heard about people
who travelled to Kurdistan in that period I was there and travelers in
the early twentieth century. I began to look for the photographs of the
people who made the same trip as mine but earlier. I began to see
myself as a traveller in time, an image maker in time crossing the
history of this place at a particular moment. Therefore I began this
exchange which meant bringing back photographs from the western
archive that Kurds had never seen but they knew they had been
made, then they started to show their own pictures from family
albums which I photographed. They felt they were contributing to their
own collective history gathered by a lot of fragments. I started to feel
that the photographs are really embedded stories.
I also added official documents from CIA about PKK, the kurd militia
and everything talking about Kurds. So the book is made out of what
could be found, it tries to speak to the different parts. We're talking
about a population about twenty-four millions spread over many
countries with no archives nationally. Of course with the exile you
loose things. After the book was published I worked on a website
which is called akakurdistan.com where pictures and texts were
uploaded from this very disperse community to trying continue this
storytelling. It was a way to break the fixed form that every book has
and keep adding new contents but online and dialoguing with the
communities.
I show you another project in honor of Miguel Rio Branco because
Miguel and I were lost in Lisbon for a couple of weeks trying on a
project [Portugal as seen by Magnum photographers, together with
Joseph Koudelka as well. Centro Cultural de Belém, 2004]. The
project at the end was talking about immigration in Portugal, you
know Portugal is not as diverse as Brazil, and it was a very though
place. For me the process really began in gifting photographs and it's
fascinating how these though guys who controlled the neighborhood
were so diffident until they saw the Polaroids developed in their
hands. It was so magical and it was powerful for them. They all
wanted one of them. So the whole relationship in this community of
“what is this white girl doing walking around a essentially black
neighborhood? Is she a police? What does she want?” shifted in this
process of exchange with the photographs. How they wanted to be
seen, then let to having a celebration in the neighborhood with
murals, all those Polaroids they just wanted to place. Some of my
photographs are now there in those places where I photographed. So
it was a mix of my photographs of those who wanted to be part of the
festival of São João.
This is the last piece I'm going to show and it's just before the work in
Portugal. I made it in june for the twenty-fifth anniversary when I
brought back the photographs I made in Nicaragua to make murals
there. It was a project called Reframing History and it was really to
revalue what do this pictures mean now. Placing them back into the
landscapes where they were taken it was interesting for us to see the
reactions of Nicaraguans seeing those photographs, so we made a
video of people just looking at the photographs in Nicaragua and
that's what I show you now.
[they show the clip she mentioned]
The photographs are in the space as a kind of memory and the
emphasis is really on the video in the middle of the space which is
hearing Nicaraguans talking about history and what they remember of
that time. The translation is scrolling on the side of a wall, but it's
essentially a video of the photographs being seen again and people
talking about what that means to them. As always everyone has his
own interpretation of their history so it's a kind of open process. It's
very different from when you experience it in Berlin, and specifically
Berlin in the middle of Europe. Or you are a Nicaraguan, or you are
an American such as myself who somehow strangely came to cross
the path of most of this continente. There is a strange way in how we
are life-crossed and i'm fascinated by that juncture. I guess it's the
photograph that makes it possible.
Ricardo Mendes: Eu queria aproveitar que você mostrou o projeto
Reframing History porque é um dos pontos do seu trabalho que mais
me atrai. Não só essa questão da evolução da fotografia, mas um
pouco pensar essa ação como uma forma de elaborar e estimular a
memória social. Pelo que você falou, aparentemente as suas
relações foram muito mais espontâneas, não havia muito mais
unidade nessa recuperação dessa memória? As pessoas formavam
grupo pra discutir ou era algo totalmente de auto-reconhecimento
pessoal estritamente?
Susan Meiselas: In the first visit with pictures from revolution, people
were fascinated to see themselves. It's unusual, a “gusto” recognizing
himself because the sandinists had actually published some pictures
in local papers so they knew the photographs. Twenty-five years after
those photographs, very few people knew that people in the
photographs except to people who were in the photographs, so much
time had passed. In some places when you see little boys looking,
you see this is a history they haven't lived and I think Marcelo
Brodsky's work speaks how can history stay alive. What was
fascinating in the video were the ten minutes where we did was
exactly that: gathering people's interactions, watching how people
looked and what they said. Sometimes individually sometimes to two
or three, debates about Somoza and so on. I think it's getting better
going backward or forward in the history. It's not just giving back, it's
a continuous set of questions, reevaluating ourselves in time.
Ricardo Mendes: Eu gostaria de fazer uma ponte com o projeto do
Kurdistão. Nesse caso, é um projeto pro mundo, ele funciona como
um site, como uma exposição que circula pelo planeta. Como
instrumento que usa a internet, você teve uma resposta a partir do
Kurdistão, dos movimentos organizados de resistência do Kurdistão
relacionados ao seu projeto?
Susan Meiselas: Unlikely in Latin America, there are various groups
in various countries fighting for how the history should be told. I
haven't been back to Kurdistan, I'm going in a month and I'm so
excited. Since 1994 when I was doing this work, I was six and a half
years gathering work but Saddam started to really look for Americans
working in northern Iraq, so in 1994/95 it began to be very dangerous
to stay there. I was forced to leave Iraq and I continued working in
Turkey and other places with the exiled. Then the Internet just
became a logical extension of the book to continue storytelling from
so many different perspectives. I was able to cross boundaries in
some ways sectarians, distinctions are strong among the different
Kurd organizations about their vision of history. What was interesting
to me is how little of them knew the history of the countries that are
just alongside, even though they are all Kurds they have been
impacted by living in Turkey or living in Iran or living in Iraq. In fact the
book became a possibility of bringing all of these different pieces of
history together.
Marcelo Brodsky: Quería agradecerte por aceptar nuestra invitación
de venir por primera vez en tu vida a este país tan diverso e
interesante, y agradecerte también por el ejemplo de compromiso
con cada uno de los trabajos humanísticos y fotográficos con los que
nos estás enseñando tu obra. Quería entonces preguntarte si
piensas que en este trabajo que parece ser de compromiso
humanista con las realidades que te toca enfrentar, la fotografía y el
trabajo documental que realizas desarrollan una función a parte de la
comunicación que ejerce sobre los medios; una función de
reconocimiento de la identidad de los lugares en los que trabajas,
porque este regreso permanente trabaja con la identidad del otro.
Quería saber también hasta que punto eso permite a tus
interlocutores conocerse, mejorarse a sí mismos y cicatrizar algunas
de sus heridas.
Susan Meiselas: Why time is so important? I don't know. Time is
photography. When I did the Nicaragua film many people really hated
it. They didn't want to see the people in the photographs as people.
They wanted the photographs to be photographs. But this question of
to what extent images can migrate into different environments and be
reconsidered is something I think is very important. For me to see the
murals in Nicaragua it's completely different than bringing them into
an european context. They have a different resonance so we all have
this perspectives on this object that it's not fixed.
Marcelo Brodsky: So the work has different interactions each time is
shown.
Susan Meiselas: Absolutely. I find that a fascinating pursuit to really
understand that interaction, whether it's a photograph going into a
media publication, there are many examples of how they get used or
misused or represent things out of my control. So the idea of making
a book to bring it back into my perspective.
Marcelo Brodsky: So you are learning all the time...
Susan Meiselas: You're learning all the time by revisiting in a sense,
maybe for me. That's why I go back and then go forward again.
Marcelo Brodsky: So it's a never ending project.
Susan Meiselas: Well not every project, some places had held me, I
don't know why. I feel Nicaragua is the core, though I went back to
the Mozote when they exhumed those graves. Sometimes places
hold you, they're with you even if you go very far away. I was away
for a decade in Kurdistan and yet it was important for me to go back
to Nicaragua.
Marcelo Brodsky: There is an emotional relationship with those
places you go, not only the photographs isn't it. It's like being part of
the historical process.
Susan Meiselas: Well, maybe it's finding the logic of why you are
there, what you can contribute. That's a piece of it for me, what can I
contribute. We can all talk about how many images are made in the
world, does it need more images to be made? What can you
contribute about our understanding of photography? I think that's
maybe why some of the projects now that have to do with
communities have more resonance.
Simonetta Persichetti: Seguindo um pouco a linha do Marcelo, e
lembrando a frase de ontem da Nadja Peregrino “uma civilização que
não teve a fotografia morreu duas vezes”, qual a importância quando
você pediu para as pessoas do Kurdistão construírem sua própria
historia e memoria? O que eles elegiam para ficar no livro, para
contar a sua história? Como eles queriam ser vistos? Como foi para
você criar esse livro, editar essa história, do ponto de vista deles?
Susan Meiselas: I had a lot of network support and in a way not that
different than carnival strippers where I made photographs, I brought
back the contact sheets, they saw themselves being represented and
we talked about the pictures. In the same way by using Polaroids
they saw what I thought was interesting and they educated me with
their comments. I would see someone in a photograph many times by
different people, it's like so many people made the photograph. By
looking closely at the photographs people present it, so I started to
learn the history asking questions. In the end I feel yes, I made a final
edit and the design and it's complex as it can be but it's true, they
were shaping the history with me in a sense. First by what they
saved, why did they save the photographs they saved. Again I think
even living in Brazil you can imagine what is like to live in a culture
where there are no institutions, at least at that time. Nothing could be
saved. I met photographers who buried their photographs for fear that
Saddam would take them. People who had gone in exile left
everything. So photographs have a lot of poignancy and I'm sure that
many things left out of this history of course, but I thought that it had
to be a kind of continuous exchange. I was filming myself, I was
constantly carrying these things that got bigger and bigger around in
scrapbooks, I was asking to people to look, to comment, to react to
the work.
Simonetta Persichetti: Quando você filmou o trabalho das strippers
e depois filmou a Nicarágua, você acha que conseguiu dar mais voz
a essas pessoas trabalhando com filme do que simplesmente
através da foto? Pelo fato de ter a voz delas, o movimento delas,
elas conseguem ter mais influencia, mais colocação do que uma
“simples” foto?
Susan Meiselas: I think that in the work of the strippers I felt some
photos were missing the power of how they understood their lives.
They were sharing that with me and I wanted to show it in my work. I
was writing from the beginning and capturing the sound. The
difference was that I didn't have the medium, now we can show it as
a CD, uploaded to the Internet but in those days I collected the sound
and my first show before the book was with voices in the room. I
always perceive that relationship is essential. In Nicaragua, going
back ten years after I was not interested in how much older people
looked, I was interested in how they understood why they had done
and what they had done in that moment. That could only be in sound
and video.
Marcelo Brodsky: Your photography doesn’t seem to be just a part
of the process but part of a project that ends with this question of how
can I contribute. Do you think that would be the right question to
make in each project?
Susan Meiselas: I think we all contribute in different ways. This is
what seems right for me, I have to ask that question. It's not that I
don't make pictures that just can be on a wall, I need to understand
why people want certain pictures on their wall. I know we're going to
talk about collecting, the first time someone wanted the photograph it
was on the cover of the El Salvador book, white hands on a red door,
it was really hard for me to understand what did it mean to bring that
photograph into his home. And yet that's what he wanted. Again I
think we don't know very much about, we know the people collect to
increase the value of their investment but there are many other
reasons why people make connection to specific images and want
them around them and with them. I'm always fascinated by which
images have what kind of lives. How broad the spectrum of their life
is: within a narrative of a specific story or isolated, almost iconic,
separated, standing for the story.
Marcelo Brodsky: And the process of editing not only your
photograph but also other people's images and documents seems to
be a very important part of the process. Why don't you talk a little bit
about these processes in which you're not a photographer in a way?
Susan Meiselas: I felt very very happy in El Salvador and very
natural. I don't know if it could happen today but we all were so
involved in witnessing the everyday life there in that particular period
of five years in the eighties. It was a small country but no one had it
all so there was an interesting discussion at that time by a central
group of photographers working which was “Do we make a book of
portfolios of our pictures to celebrate ourselves as photographers or
do we make a book that is about this place, this time, this history?”.
That was what we decided to do and the photographs have a
reference in the back, who made them, but the principle was a
narrative that was focused on El Salvador. Now it's a very essential
decision of that time. Which photographers feel that about some other
places I don't know, but it was a completely collective and instinctive
thing to do. Then we travelled to show the work around the States. At
that time there was a big debate about the american military aid to El
Salvador so the photographs became part of a experience in which
“latinos” living in San Diego or Chicago became part of the
discussion. This is when America was trying to close out. The fear of
immigrants crawling across the border, it was the beginning of this
issue we still have very present in the States about immigration. The
work from El Salvador became a focal point in all these communities
where Salvadorians were fleeing from the war and living in these
cities. Photographs have one life in the magazines where they
reporting on a situation, a different life in the book, a different life as
the exhibition travelled and interact in these local communities. Even
in libraries different than galleries. Again I think we don't use public
space, we're still a ghetto community. As broad as photography is it's
still a ghetto and I think there are many more people out on the
Avenida Paulista who are not amongst us.
PERGUNTAS DO PÚBLICO
Eduardo Muylaert: Nós tivemos o prazer de observar aqui muito do
seu trabalho documental, humanitário, sensível, político, que é
fantástico. Nós vimos aqui Santa Susana. Você um ensaio, uma
color feature, agora em
Nova Iorque
sobre as casas de
sadomasoquismo que de alguma maneira com o seu começo
Carnival Strippers. Isso tem a ver com seus próprios conflitos como
pessoa?
Susan Meiselas: My own conflicts? I'm fascinated by your
interpretation. I couldn't show everything that work is relational to
Carnival Strippers. I think it has a lot to do with Latin America, a lot to
do with violence and trying to understand violence. I can easily show
you the pictures of a body in the landscape, the Mazote massacre. I
can go on and on and on but how many pictures you absorb and you
still don't understand in this basic act of “What it means?”. Then to be
inside a room where one person actually pay someone else to
experience violence against themselves and choses the weapon, I
think it has to do with those interrogation rooms that I've never saw
but I've heard about. I don't think I can only touch on some aspects of
what it provoked for me. The parallel to strippers is women
empowered. Maybe other will have a different opinion but for me the
strippers are talking about their own defiance to be in charge of their
life, they position themselves. If you really hear and you read the
whole book they are very truthful about the power exchange that it's
going on as with the dominatrix. So... “What's the conflict?” I'm a
woman in a men's world, it's not so easy.
Angela Magalhães: Na sua explanação, ficou muito clara a questão
do fotodocumentarismo de caráter mais humanista e social, onde
você contextualiza as questões do povo que você registra, numa
tentativa de “devolver” o que de uma certa maneira você “tirou”
deles. Com relação a outros tipos de projetos nessa linha do
fotodocumentarismo,
existe
uma
crítica
no
sentido
de
eles
estetizarem o que fotografam, e muitas vezes não devolverem à
comunidade subsídios para discutirem sua realidade. Como você vê
essa questão?
Susan Meiselas: We are all who we are. I can go to some places
and not go back but if you ask me to think about the things that are
most meaningful to me it's not that. There are a lot of functions of
photography and I'm glad for people in Iraq today that can survive to
report, trying to be out there and see for us what is happening. I've a
huge respect for that work, even if they never bring it together in a
book form or they never find a way to do anything more than deliver
to news services that -as we all know- exploit them and own the
copyright. Anyway they are still doing something for all of us who
cannot have to be at war. I'm speaking as an American, it's our war
but it's so easy for us not having to live with it. I don't think it's so easy
to position oneself in judgement of someone else. It's hard for me to
feel comfortable as an outsider, I'm also a “gringa” I know it and I
have to live with that.
Marcelo Brodsky: An important part of your work is also a kind of a
message, a comment, a statement towards your own country and its
role...
Susan Meiselas: I don't think is that. It's a big world, and it's difficult
to figure out where you belong in it; it's part of the touchstone. I think
that Carnival Strippers is very much me, age twenty-three thinking
about issues of femininity. That work is of that time and I think I'm
really understanding American power through Nicaragua and El
Salvador. There have been many other wars in the world, but it's not
just following what's happening, it's trying to make sense of what
relationship you can have somewhere.
Lucas Sampaio: Eu sou da Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina.
A Susan falou vai voltar pro Kurdistão daqui a um mês. Você está
ansiosa para voltar? Você vai voltar com a mesma intenção de
quando voltou da Nicarágua, de fazer um relato voltado para eles, ou
você pretende fazer um novo trabalho? Também queria saber qual a
sua posição sobre a guerra do Iraque hoje, porque tanto na
Nicarágua quanto no Kurdistão a influencia dos EUA na vida do povo
local é muito grande. Qual tipo de trabalho você vai fazer quando
voltar para lá em um mês?
Susan Meiselas: First of all, the Kurds are very happy about this
war, so everything is more complicated than we think it is. For me, I
didn't support the war. I see how they benefited it from this war and I
guess I would see how they benefited it. My answer to what I'm going
to do there I'll can only give you it when I'll be back. I have ideas
partly related to this database material that I want to make available
to them, maybe an installation of some kind that I don't know yet,
maybe new photographs. For me the ideas come from being there,
come from the interaction. I didn't go to Kurdistan with the idea to
spend seven years building a visual history, it envolved being
interacting with people, seen those photographs that were so
important to them and wondering how whether or not photographs
can really tell a piece of this story as I said. I hope to come back and
have some ideas to come back again. In the case of Nicaragua I was
in and out over time, I went back also for people's birthdays, I went
back for other kind of events in those twenty-five years. So Kurdistan
is a big gap of twelve years, everything is changed so I don't know
how the work will be. I'm excited by not knowing. I think that what's so
great in photography is this not knowing. You don't know where
something begins, where will it take you.
Luís Weinstein: Tus fotografías funcionan mucho como un testigo
de algo que hubo. Muestran aquello que existió en este lugar. ¿Qué
opina en general de la fotografía y el mundo del arte en la que
estamos viendo desarrollarse?
Susan Meiselas: It depends on what we really mean. This word is so
slippery. What does it mean that some of my photographs are bought
by museums as art with capital A versus others that are journalism
with capital J? There are also “D” documentary versus “PJ”
photojournalism... Lucio and I met in Chile about fifteen years ago, he
was one of the photographers who were part of the Chile project and
he said a very interesting thing. The photographers I worked with
were a core group of six which did the editing with me, together we
made this narrative of their lives. He said that they were front line
photographers and it was true. We met them on the front line, under
the water tanks and all the craziness of those years in Chile and
that's a very strong bound for photographers. Lucio was saying that
this small group, the six that brought this book together with me, I
came to them when they realized that they had some gap. They were
missing daily life, other kinds of life than the front line battle in Chile.
And now everyone in New York told me “Don't take your camera to
São Paulo!” and he's walking around with his Leica while I'm really
pissed off. The advice was to take a little camera that can stay in a
pocket so what does it mean? How do we all work? You can work on
the street and feel free. There's a great tradition of street
photographers like Garry Winogrand or Robert Frank who worked
outside of narratives but i'm trapped in narrative. The street doesn't
work for me. So going back to your question you can value things that
you don't do, whether or not my work is called “A”, “J”, “PJ”, I don't
think that's really the core. You still have to wake up in the morning
and figure out what you're going to do tomorrow. It doesn't sustain me
anyway.
Nadja Peregrino: A minha pergunta é um pouco a inversão do que
você está falando agora. O Don McCullin, que já fotografou diversas
guerras, em uma entrevista recente disse que isso repercutiu muito
na vida dele. Ele possui um arquivo de memória que a cada noite
povoa de imagens a cabeça dele. Queria te perguntar para você
como pessoas, como mulher, qual é o impacto que essas fotos
desse seu trabalho tão forte tem na tua própria vida?
Susan Meiselas: It's such a hard question. I think about the
thickness of skin one needs to have. It has to be porous and yet
protective. That's a very subtle balance. I think in many ways I have
this feeling of being cut up in a lot of little pieces. Sometimes I can
feel fragmented by, sometimes makes me feel whole. A part of my life
is in Nicaragua, another part is in Kurdistan, I'm doing another project
now in China and in each of those places I'm sort of strangely finding
a world in which it makes sense to be there.