Focusing on the work of American documentary photographer Susan Meiselas, this addition to the Photofile series presents her impactful photography alongside her own brief writings that provide context and insight into each piece.
Compiled by Magnum photojournalist Susan Meiselas, Eyes Open is a sourcebook of photography ideas for kids--to engage with the world through the camera.Forty-one enticing projects help inspire a process of discovery and new ways of telling stories and animating ideas. Eyes Open features photographs by young people from around the globe--providing a window into different cultures--as well as work by professional artists that demonstrates how a simple idea can be expanded. Playful and meaningful, this book is for young would-be photographers and those interested in expressing themselves creatively.
In her most recent body of work, acclaimed photographer Susan Meiselas pieces together verbal and visual traces of encounters with the Dani--an indigenous people of the West Papuan highlands--from the nearly six decades since their "discovery" by the West. In this subjective, fragmentary history, Meiselas draws from the experiences of missionaries, colonists, anthropologists and modern-day ecotourists, all of whom have come to the Dani's Baliem Valley and transformed the conditions under which they live. The ambiguous relations between power and representation--whether in the form of Dutch colonial patrol notes from the 1930s, the sensationalized media accounts of the survivors of a downed U.S. army plane in "Shangri-La" from the 1940s or a tourist's snapshots from the 1990s--become visible in Meiselas's book, through both the contradictions and unexpected continuities of the gathered materials.