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SHOOTING THE REVOLUTION
Photojournalist Susan Meiselas' riveting scenes from Nicaragua, El Salvador on display at UC Berkeley
Sam Whiting, Chronicle Staff Writer
Saturday, February 6, 1999
The rebel rises from the sandbags, wearing a Che Guevara beret and beard,
crucifix and a face of revolutionary rage. As he lifts his rifle in left
hand, Molotov cocktail in right, Susan Meiselas raises her camera.
That instant marks the beginning of an image that would become a wall
mural, poster, matchbox cover and symbol of the 1979 Sandinista insurrection
in Nicaragua.
Susan Meiselas' picture
of a Sandinista rebel in the 1979 Nicaraguan revolt became a symbol of
the insurrection. She made notes in the margins years later when she
returned to track down the subject....
Twenty years later, Meiselas is still studying the construction and
deconstruction of a documentary picture. Both ends are represented in "Central America Documentation/Mediation,'' which opened Thursday at the
Center for Photography Gallery at the University of California at Berkeley's
Graduate School of Journalism.
The Sandinista series, published in Meiselas' book "Nicaragua,'' is
complemented by pictures from subsequent books, moving up the Central
American isthmus to conflict in El Salvador and the struggle at the U.S.-
Mexico border.
The vintage prints from Nicaragua are enhanced by spectacular color. Some
of the
street fighters, far from wearing camouflage, have on bright red masks, and
the poor people Meiselas follows like to wear bold colors to offset the
bleak taupe of the rubble and the florid green of the countryside. In con
trast, the Salvador work is traditional black-
and-white war photography. The border images are panoramic and wide like the
fence.
The photograph, and her series,
were made into a book, "Nicaragua," which includes a cover shot from
the revolution. Susan Meiselas photography
Viewed together, the works span a decade of "going places where I don't
belong,'' says Meiselas, who has been rewarded for her bravery and eye with
a MacArthur "genius'' grant, Capa Gold Medal and about every other award
for valor in photojournalism.
"We as Americans know very little about the people of the world,'' she
says. "So what I do is go out there to find out the best I can what's
happening, who these people are, and make some sense of it and bring it
back.''
A veteran free-lancer with the international cooperative Magnum Photos,
Meiselas is based in New York. She has had solo shows in New York, Chicago,
London, Stockholm, Paris. But this is the
first time that her prints have been given context through outtakes, layouts
in the major newsmagazines and images from her book.
The full evolution describes the "trafficking of images,'' says
Meiselas, who is here for a week working on a domestic violence project.
Five years ago she worked with the San Francisco police and district
attorney's office to make a series of collages about battered women. The
collages appeared in bus shelters.
"I'm going to find the people and talk about, in the intervening time,
what has happened in their lives,'' says Meiselas, who followed the same
hunch to Nicaragua 10 years after the Sandinista revolt. A film of that
journey, "Pictures From a Revolution'' (1991), was screened last night at
the Berkeley journalism school.
"I'm trying to bring the material together and create a home for it so
that someone from this world can experience that world,'' says Meiselas, 50,
who knew nothing of that world herself when she was intrigued by a New York
Times story in January 1978 about the assassination of newspaper editor
Pedro Joaquin Chamorro. His son, Carlos Fernando Chamorro, is the first
person she met on arrival. He is now a fellow at the
Berkeley journalism school. Meiselas didn't know any of the subjects, or
even their names, and over the years became curious about meeting them.
Susan Meiselas says, "We as Americans know very little about the people of the world." Chronicle Photo by Frederic Larson
"What I didn't know was how people in Nicaragua experienced those images
-- when they knew of them and what had happened in their lives, in relation
to the act that the photograph happens to capture,'' she says, "so I was
very interested in that process for the protagonists of those photographs.''
To find them, in 1989 she went back to the same
street corners, carrying "Nicaragua'' like a yearbook under her arm.
She would show pictures and in Spanish inquire about the people,
marking names and clues to their whereabouts in the margins. Some of
her subjects were still in the same place, their routine no different
after the revolution than before. For others, someone would recognize a
face in a crowd. She'd circle it, get a name, jump in her car and
follow the hint down a pock-marked dirt road. "Sometimes I had to go
halfway across the country, crisscrossing.''
In search of the Molotov man, she marked up her book with directions and
finally found him quietly hauling wood in a beat-up truck. His material life
hadn't improved, but he told Meiselas something she wouldn't forget.
"The revolutionary spirit,'' he said, "is in my blood.''
