Photo via Milwaukee Art Museum
“Every generation thinks it invented sex,” is what my father told me when describing my first college party. The adage didn’t resonate with me until many years later. Its delayed onset sums up what I have come to understand as one of life’s most inconvenient paradoxes: that passionate conviction is replaced incrementally with passive wisdom as we age, leaving civilization less than perfectly equipped to tackle its most pressing issues. This inevitability was shaken as I admired Susan Meiselas’s exhibition, “Through a Woman’s Lens” at the Milwaukee Art Museum (through March 14), where I witnessed the artist as a bridge over that chasm of human contradiction.
Meiselas’s life in photography and moving images was forged in the 1970s, during a time many mature visitors will recognize as the furnace of feminist activism. The hundreds of photographs and film stills at MAM reflect an assiduous engagement with her subjects, built one-by-one into a single expression of interconnection, courage, diversity, and ultimately, female empowerment.
“Through a Woman’s Lens” is organized into bodies of work, not necessarily in chronological order—viewers are directed through the show by a series of arrows to meet safety protocols. The opening gallery features work from what is perhaps her most recognizable and political series, featuring images and film stills of daily life in Nicaragua during the popular uprising in 1978/1979 that deposed the U.S.-backed Somoza dictatorship. The work is by turns pathetic and objective, depicting the struggle from the perspective of the FSLN. It delves deeper into the mundane and irregular creases of daily life than traditional photojournalism.
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Human Struggle
There’s an image of a young woman carrying her naked toddler in one arm and a gunny sack in the other as she trudges down a rural road, presumably fleeing war-born chaos. Another photograph features a class of National Guard trainees razzing a blindfolded student who appears to be struggling to disassemble an M-16. While these are clearly images of conflict, they remain centered on the lives of individuals embroiled in a human struggle, rather than human symbols of geopolitics.
It’s fascinating to witness the evolution of her work over 40-plus years. Meiselas joined Magnum Photos in 1976, a cooperative of photographers known for their focus on social activism. Her series of photographs featuring women in the U.S. Army feels like a gateway into her more overtly political work. Supplemental wall text reminds us that female participation in the armed forces increased significantly after the draft was eliminated in 1973. Meiselas captures everything from women in grueling bootcamp renditions to others applying makeup in their barracks. The visual candor in these photos addresses the humanity and nuance often lost in the headlines and snapshots from the period.
The wayfinding arrows continue to lead back in time–with the exception of a powerful interlude centered on domestic abuse–to Meiselas’s formative relationships with her female subjects. We are delivered to the early 1970’s; to her student work of flatmates in Cambridge, MA, a series of girls in New York’s Little Italy, and, most fantastically, to visions of carnival strippers who Meiselas captured at county fairs throughout New England with a 35 mm Leica camera. The effects of the flashless camera render these usually guarded sexualized performers with tender and soft dimensionality. Meiselas’s photos pull the marginalized and exploited women from the shadows, and improbably into the fray of feminist debate of the time.
Later in her career Meiselas’s work veered in a more activist direction. The aforementioned series of domestic abuse works features a mix of photographs of victims and witness accounts of events that are achingly painful and more difficult to look at than her earlier work. Still, it’s a logical destination for an individual so clearly devoted to the lives and welfare of women across a period of such great social change. Her sensitivity never flags even as her scope of vision broadens. Meiselas’s five decades of photographic activism reminds us that art can bridge contradictions humans often can’t, by being impulsive and careful; personal and social, private and public, and, yes, naïvely passionate and wise all at once.
