Susan Meiselas: How do we witness

In this interview, American photographer Susan Meiselas talks about her collaboration with Mark Karlin on his flagship project in Nicaragua during the Sandinista revolution, and the ethical questions it raises about the profession of photojournalist. 

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Zoé Isle de Beauchaine: How did you meet Marc Karlin and come to work together ?

Susan Meiselas: It’s a funny story, I was first in Nicaragua during the popular insurrection. I went in and out over the next decade to see what was happening in the country. One day I was up in the North hitchhiking, when someone with a big jeep stopped and offered me a ride. Her name was Hermione Harris, she was working for the Catholic Institute for International Relations. Hermione was Marc Karlin's partner. He later came to Nicaragua to visit the country with her. That was our first encounter. We spent time getting to know each other over the next years. When Mark decided to make the four-part series that ran on Channel 4, the first film was Voyages, it drew on our various letter exchanges.

ZB: As a photographer how do you perceive his work as a filmmaker ? 

SM: When I began to work with Marc I actually had not seen any of his films that had been broadcast in the United Kingdom. I was based in the US at that time. I came to know his work much later. I really loved working with him and enjoyed thinking about what we could create together. It was challenging for me to compress a very complex experience into a progression of ideas. I loved how Mark decided to visualize the film Voyages, but really we discovered each other in the process of working together.

ZB: How did you first come to Nicaragua?

SM: Well, that’s obviously a much longer story. I read about Nicaragua in January 1978, when the opposition newspaper editor, Pedro Joaquín Chamorro, was assassinated. Basically it stunned me that I had no idea where Nicaragua was and the relationship that the US had for over five decades supporting the Somoza family, which kept them in power. It took me five months to go, but once I got there, I spent the next year covering the evolution of the popular insurrection.

ZB: How have your relationship to your work and the perception of your role as a photojournalist evolved since you wrote this long letter ?

SM: The long letter was written in fragments. Consciousness evolves over time, which the film tries to capture. I never defined myself as a photojournalist. I hadn't worked for the media before I went to Nicaragua, and I haven't really worked with it in a consistent way since then. But at that time, the media was the perfect platform to make visible what was happening in Nicaragua. So documentary practice, which is how I think about my work, is an immersive process, really coming to know a place or a group of people over time. That’s been my photographic approach for most of my life. 

Caroline Henry: Have you always written about your experiences alongside your photography? 

SM: No, I would say not. Marc encouraged me to write him. Writing does not come easily to me. I struggle with it. I do like contextualizing the photographs I make but more often with the voices of those who are in the photographs or other archival materials. So that's obviously a filmic more than a photographic practice. I do like experimenting by recording voices to complement images I’ve made.

ZB: Has Susan Sontag’s thinking been an influence on the way you take pictures and perceive your practice ? 

SM: I began photography before I started reading Susan Sontag. I don't know if I would use the word influence but of course I was aware of her thinking and in some ways it may have shaped some of the ways I have worked. But there's a distance between the practice of photography and the theory or thinking about photography. 

You have to resolve whatever contradictions you feel in the act of making photographs yourself and find ways to work through the meaning of that act. And for me, sometimes it's about what I make, sometimes it's what I repatriate, it's often in dialogue with ‘subjects’ about how they are represented. I don't even like the word subjects—we can say ‘photographed persons’. I was just working on a book with four other authors called Collaboration : A Potential History of Photography, in which we explore the ways in which relationships can go beyond the author and include the people we photograph as well as the communities that we work within. It's not something Sontag wrote about. 

ZB: If you came back to Nicaragua and the events of the Sandinista Revolution today, would you proceed differently ?

SM: Yes, certainly--the means of production have changed so much! If I were in the midst of the insurrection that I covered in 1978-79 with the tools of an iPhone now, maybe I would be making videos and not still photographs at all. I was shooting with film, both color and black and white at that time, and now it’s all digital - maybe I would be using instagram or some other means to capture and convey the passion of those times. I don't know what it would be. 

Now we have become so dependent as viewers and spectators from a distance on the recordings through the eyes of those who are living through those events. At the time I was there I was often working alongside Nicaraguans and other Latin American photographers. Maybe I wouldn't go at all now. It's where you place yourself in time, and what you choose to return to. What you DO with the images you've made? These are all open questions that I continue to explore.

CH: So this will be more different with the new tools, but you wouldn't say your view on events would change now?

SM: If you're asking me what I think about what's happening in Nicaragua today, that's a different question. I'm not getting into the politics of Nicaragua now and the disappointments in relation to the dreams Nicaraguans had at the time of the triumph. That's a whole other conversation really. 

My last visit to Nicaragua was in July 2018 at the time of the popular resistance movement to President Ortega. A lot has happened since then, many people who were in the streets were forced into exile, arrested and imprisoned soon after. History is a complicated evolving process. As a documentarian I can follow, but I am not living there. I'm not able to be present as a witness now, except through the eyes of others. 

CH: Maybe a new person you are now that would receive the events differently ?

SM: I didn't place myself in the Ukraine. I'm not able to get into Gaza. At this time I look for a different kind of connection to the work I make. I'm less likely to go to a place which I know nothing about and spend a year as I did in Nicaragua then. Especially if I don't feel there's some reason for me to specifically be there with a sense of what I can contribute. I see the work being done, by local or regional photographers. I've spent the last two decades supporting diversity in the field, to train and bring more exposure of work from regional perspectives, including Latin America and the Middle East. It's not all about me and where I go. 

I think the question is still how do we witness, how do we understand what's happening in the world, who are the best storytellers who can connect us at this time, and how do we support independent work in the field.

Interview conducted in February 2025
The photos are taken from the film Voyages
directed in 1985 by Marc Karlin
1st photo: Entering the central plaza in Managua to celebrate victory, Managua, Nicaragua, July 20, 1979 © Susan Meiselas / Magnum Photos
2nd photo:  Residential neighborhood, Matagalpa, Nicaragua, 1978 © Susan Meiselas / Magnum Photos