50 Years Photographing Different Social Groups: What Did She Capture?

American photographer Susan Meiselas has won the 2019 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize. Her subjects run from war to human rights, from cultural identity to the sex industry.

On May 16, the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize named its winner: the American documentary photographer Susan Meiselas. She won for Mediations, the retrospective solo show she held last year at the Jeu de Paume gallery in Paris.

Since 1996, the prize has gone each year to a living artist who has made a major contribution to photography in Europe through an exhibition or a publication. It is run by the Photographers' Gallery in London, and the Deutsche Börse Foundation has funded the £30,000 prize money since 2005.

Susan Meiselas was born in Baltimore in 1948. She took a bachelor's degree at Sarah Lawrence College, then a master's in visual education at Harvard. Meiselas has said she never planned to become a photographer. "But it seemed to become the best medium in the world for me, and it created relationships that have been meaningful to me for almost my whole life. Mediations is, in a way, a summary of that process."

Meiselas has been a member of Magnum Photos since 1976. She is best known for the work she did in the conflict zones of Central America in the 1970s and 1980s, and her photographs of the Nicaraguan revolution in particular have been widely praised.

Mediations gathers work Meiselas has made from the 1970s to the present. It covers many subjects and many countries — war, human rights, cultural identity, the sex industry — and she uses photographs, film, video and archival material to show how deeply she has researched each one.

In more than 50 years of work, from Kurdish communities scattered around the world to the women of Carnival Strippers, she has stayed close to her subjects, building and developing her narratives by living among the people she photographs. At the same time she keeps asking what standing an image has, what context it appears in, and what her own role as a witness amounts to.

At the Photographers' Gallery in London, which runs the prize, Meiselas has chosen to show one part of Mediations: the In the Shadow of History series. Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History (1991–2007) is a multimedia project made up of photographs, video, archival material and oral histories she collected. In 1998 she built the pioneering website akaKURDISTAN, an online archive of collective memory and cultural exchange.

This archive of collective memory lays out the history of a people scattered across the world. Meiselas first went to northern Iraq to document the "Anfal genocide" that Saddam launched against the Kurds in 1988. As she came to understand more, she used photographs, film and writing to follow the lives of ordinary Kurds exiled all over the globe — work that shows how closely she collaborated with scholars, historians and local communities.

On one wall of the exhibition hangs a map of the world, with chains running from every place where a Kurdish community has taken root. Handmade booklets hang from the chains, holding personal statements and family photographs from local people. This is the installation's "story map," and stories from the Kurdish diaspora are added to it regularly, through participatory workshops, so the show grows every time it is mounted. The booklets are made in workshops that displaced Kurds organize in the cities where Meiselas's work is exhibited. This past March she ran one at the gallery for members of London's Kurdish community.

Brett Rogers, chair of the judging panel and director of the Photographers' Gallery, praised Meiselas for "pioneering a new and important form of socially engaged photography." Her way of working gives the pictures a humanity that conventional reportage lacks. "They bring their own photographs and memories," she said at a similar workshop in Paris last year. "That way, the work on show keeps growing."

In a video interview filmed when she was shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Foundation prize, she said: "It just evolved naturally into the work I do now. Whenever Kurdistan is shown somewhere, I go looking for local voices. They might be people who settled there long ago, or refugees who arrived recently. These are small stories, not big history, but for the people who contribute them, I hope it's a meaningful moment."

Mediations opens with 44 Irving Street, a series she made in 1971 — portraits of the neighbors in the apartment building where she lived as a graduate student at Harvard. Each photograph shows a tenant in one corner of their room. Some are hung with short texts written by the subjects themselves, accounts that reveal how they saw and understood themselves in the pictures. Through those exchanges with her subjects, Meiselas looks at how they relate to the places they live.

The Prince Street Girls project (1975–1990) was shot over 15 years in New York's Little Italy. The girls — aged 8 to 10 in 1975 — used to hang around on the street, and Meiselas came to focus on them by chance. They were from Italian-American families and many of them were related. The photographs follow the slow changes in their lives and their bodies as they grew into young women. Meiselas left in 1978 to cover the wars in Central America; by the time she came back to the neighborhood a decade later, the girls had all moved on from the streets where they used to play and started families of their own. The series records the gentrification of Little Italy as well as the girls' passage into adulthood.

She wrote on her website: "Looking at these photographs, I'm reminded how hard it was to reconcile my two lives — family and friends back home, and my life on the road as a photographer. It was a painful separation, over and over, though I don't regret choosing that kind of parting. I still live in the old neighborhood, though it has changed enormously; it's full of young models and internet companies, fashionable cafés and expensive shops. It's almost impossible to picture what the street used to look like."

At the center of Mediations is the artist's own doubt about how photographic images get used. Meiselas went to Nicaragua with no assignment, to cover the popular uprising that followed the assassination of an editor at the opposition newspaper La Prensa. As she explains: "I'm not a war photographer, because that's not why I went there. What I was really interested in was how things happened, not just the surface of events." Over the three decades that followed, in war and in peace, Meiselas kept returning to the places where she had taken those first pictures, finding the people in them and recording what they had to say. That material became her third film, Nicaragua, Pictures from a Revolution (1991).

In July 2004, to mark 25 years since the fall of the Somoza regime, Meiselas went back to Nicaragua with 19 mural-sized enlargements of photographs she had taken in 1978 and 1979, and worked with local communities to build sites of collective memory. The project, Reframing History, put the photographs on public walls and in open spaces in the towns where they were first taken. What went up on the walls were the everyday scenes she had shot during the upheaval — a way of questioning the value of an image by setting off the memory it belongs to.

In the El Salvador series (1978–1983), Meiselas caught the violence of military dictatorship and the civil war that followed the 1979 coup. The photographs show life going on near the sites of killings, and the standing tension between the military and civilians.

Rogers, the chair of the judges, believes that Meiselas "sustains an evolving relationship with people and the environments they inhabit, one that feels especially pertinent and resonant today."

Work by this year's shortlisted photographers is on show at the Photographers' Gallery in London until June 2. Besides Susan Meiselas, the other three are the Spanish photographer Laia Abril, with On Abortion; the German photographer Arwed Messmer, with his solo show RAF – No Evidence; and the American photographer Mark Ruwedel, with his solo show Artist and Society.

The cover image is from the Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History series, from the artist's website, © Susan Meiselas / Magnum Photos 2019