My name is Susan Meiselas. I'm a photographer based in New York. Carnival Strippers is the first real body of work. So it's not my very first pictures, but the first time I kind of discovered a way to be a photographer that felt right for me. I didn't go out looking for carnival strippers or researching carnival strippers. I was traveling in a summer actually following small circuses that were crossing America going out to the Midwest. Then I came back through to New England and I was in Essex Junction and really everything unfolded. And then I spent two more summers really committing to following the path. Carnival Strippers begins with a series of encounters, and the photograph we're looking at, Lena of the Bally, is not the first of the images I made, but really the first time I felt like it all clicked it all made sense, why I was looking at her everyone else the world around her. I just felt magnetically, I need to know more. There were so many issues for me looking at the woman who became Lena, who I didn't know was Lena when I made the photograph. The idea of projecting a self to attract a male gaze was completely counter to my sense of culture, what I wanted for myself. So I was fascinated by women who were choosing to do that. Who is she looking at? She's looking out and looking above and looking beyond, with, I think, a really strong sense of self. The feminists of that period were perceiving the girl shows as exploitative institutions that should be closed down. And so I actually was positioned in the place of feeling these voices should be heard. They should self define as to who they are and what their economic realities are. Even the early exhibitions of this work before I finished the book had both text and sound elements. So I wanted very much for them to be able to speak from their own place and be heard directly. So my vision was a book, had I had a video cam and if it were being done today, I would have made a movie. Interweaving the text with the different voices was the closest way I could create a world, which is really what I wanted to do with this work. Getting to know the women was very much one by one. Obviously I'm in the public fairgrounds making this photograph, so there are many other people surrounding me. There weren't many other cameras. I mean if we were making this picture today it's interesting the differences of how many people would have been with cameras, iPhones, etc. So I don't think she's performing for me. She's performing for the public. I think now we find many more people performing for the cameras. So navigating from a public fairgrounds to the place where I'm invited by the women to see the world that they are within, which is the dressing room and is their zone, and just staying as long as I could and being as part of that full working process of their lives. You can't anticipate how long you're going to be there. Every night is unique. The dynamics of the girls that happen to come together varied. Some were more connected to each other, and others, there were great tensions, and I was as interested in how to visualize these relationships with women and their bodies and their comfort zones and their competitiveness. The way I most like to work is to immerse myself. To be present over time without knowing where it's going to lead me. The relationships evolved with some to be deeper in the sense that they went over multiple years. The girls show moves around from town to town. My working process was to be somewhere on a weekend, go back to Boston which at the time was my base and process the work and bring back the contact sheets and show whoever was there the following weekend what the pictures were, and they left little initials saying I like this one. I don't like that one. And I think one of the richest things that came form that sharing was the idea that they wanted portraits. I did not see myself and I still don't today really, as a portraitist but it was to honor them. It's what they wanted, it's what they needed, for their fathers, for their boyfriends. They wanted to have this controlled presentation of self, and chose where they would be in relation to the tent and which costume they would wear, more or less, some less and some more. This negotiated, or collaborative space with photography really still fascinates me. It's a kind of offering, it's a moment in which someone says, I want you to be here with us, and I wait a long time to feel that moment. The challenge of making that moment, creating that moment. That's what still intrigues me, I think, and keeps me engaged with photography.
