Susan Meiselas

Photographer
   
Mediations Pandora
Location: New York City, New York
Nationality: American
Biography: Susan Meiselas, born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1948, received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College and her MA in visual education from Harvard University. Her first major photographic essay focused on the lives of women doing striptease at New... MORE
Private Story
Mediations Pandora
Copyright Susan Meiselas 2024
Updated Sep 2021
Topics Photography
Pandora's Box

Her Pandora’s Box series (1995) was taken in an S&M club in New York and, to a certain degree, it can be thought of as a sequel to Carnival Strippers. She linked the images to the testimonies of the people involved: the manager, the mistresses and the clients. In this small place, she discovered yet another relationship to pain and violence focusing on controlled acts of violence producing self-inflicted pain: “At Pandora’s Box I was witnessing an individual choose to participate in what looked from the outside like a violent act. But it represented play in a controlled setting where the man could say, ‘Mercy, mistress’, and it stopped. Still, I found that challenging. And as with Carnival Strippers, it was the power relations that really captured my attention – women who wield a kind of power that is suspect to others.”
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