The PMA welcomes documentary photographer Susan Meiselas for this year’s Bernard Osher Lecture, our flagship annual event that welcomes visionary cultural leaders, scholars, and thinkers to Maine to share their insights and experiences with museum audiences.
Tickets:
$20 public / $15 Members / $10 Students with valid ID
From 1972 to 1975, Meiselas followed traveling carnivals in New England each summer, photographing the women who performed striptease and interviewing them, the show managers and male customers. Carnival Strippers presents women both on stage and off, with texts sharing their feelings about dancing and sex work, along with their motivations and hopes for their futures.
Carnival Strippers: Revisited (2022) is the third edition of the original Carnival Strippers (1976) which includes an accompanying volume, Making Of, featuring color photographs never seen or published before. These early Kodachrome slides add another level of immediacy to the original black and white intimate photographs, especially when juxtaposed to archival materials and personal notations from the time of Meiselas’ work in the field. Now fifty years later, the book remains as relevant as ever, as women in America are facing the consequences of the struggles around Roe v. Wade and the abortion rights it once protected.
Susan Meiselas photographed by Meryl Levin
Susan Meiselas is a documentary photographer based in New York. She is the author of Carnival Strippers (1976), Nicaragua (1981), Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History (1997), Pandora’s Box (2001), Encounters with the Dani (2003), Prince Street Girls (2016), A Room Of Their Own (2017), Tar Beach (2020) and Carnival Strippers: Revisited (2022).
Meiselas is well known for her documentation of human rights issues in Latin America. Her photographs are included in North American and international collections. In 1992 she was made a MacArthur Fellow, received a Guggenheim Fellowship (2015), and most recently the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize (2019) and the first Women in Motion Award from Kering and the Rencontres d’Arles. Mediations, a survey exhibition of her work from the 1970s to present was recently exhibited at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Jeu de Paume, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Instituto Moreira Salles in São Paulo, Kunst Haus Wien in Vienna and is presently on view at C/O Berlin. She has been the President of the Magnum Foundation since 2007, with a mission to expand diversity and creativity in documentary photography.
The annual Bernard Osher Lecture Series is made possible by the Peggy and Harold Osher Endowment at the Portland Museum of Art.