In Conversation: Archival research and oral history in photographic practice Sunil Shah, Susan Meiselas

Biographies

Susan Meiselas received her B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and her M.A. in visual education from Harvard University. Her first major photographic essay, Carnival Strippers, focused on the lives of women doing striptease at New England country fairs. She photographed the carnivals during three consecutive summers while teaching photography in the New York public schools. Meiselas joined Magnum Photos in 1976 and has worked as a freelance photographer since then. She is best known for her coverage of the insurrection in Nicaragua and her documentation of human rights issues in Latin America, which were published widely throughout the world. In 1997, she completed a six-year project curating a 100-year photographic history of Kurdistan, and integrating her own work into the book entitled Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History (Random House, 1997; reprinted by the University of Chicago Press, 2008). Meiselas then created the website, www.akaKURDISTAN.com, an online archive of collective memory; as well as an exhibition that launched at the Menil Collection in Houston, and traveled for eight years to several venues in the United States and Europe.

Sunil Shah is an artist, curator and writer based in Oxford, UK. He is Associate Editor of American Suburb X Photography and Visual Culture Platform and PhD candidate at Central St Martins, London.