Private Story
Early Years
Susan Meiselas started out in photography by exploring her own immediate surroundings. 44 Irving Street (1971) is a series of photographs of her neighbors in a boarding house where she lived when she was a graduate student. Each image shows a tenant in a corner of his or her room. Some of the photographs are exhibited with a short text written by the person portrayed. The short narrative reveals how they perceived themselves in these photographs. Meiselas interacts with her subjects to explore, through her images, their relationship to place.
In the Porch Portraits (1974) series, Meiselas explored an area in South Carolina where she taught photography in an elementary school. Stepping across the invisible boundary between the road and the private properties, she took portraits of the people in front of their small wooden houses with open verandas.
Following this experience, she developed a community-based project in Lando, an old company‑owned mill town, to portray its multi-generational life through a “visual genealogy” of families living there. This project, the first in which Meiselas compiled an archive with the participation of a community, includes images from family albums and portraits of the inhabitants.
Prince Street Girls (1975–1990) was shot over a period of 15 years in Little Italy, New York, a neighborhood where Meiselas still lives. The young girls (aged 8 to 10 years in 1975) used to hang out on the streets and initially they became a subject of her attention by chance. The photographs show the gradual transformation of their lives and bodies, as they become young women.
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