Nicaragua

Susan Meiselas first traveled to Nicaragua in June 1978. Three years prior, Meiselas had joined Magnum Photos, and this trip marked her first experience working in conflict photography. Meiselas went on to spend just over a year in Nicaragua, documenting an extraordinary narrative of a nation in turmoil, from the powerful evocation of Somoza regime during its decline in the late 1970s, to the evolution of the popular resistance that led to the triumph of the Sandinista revolution in 1979.

Originally published in 1981, and now in a third edition, Susan Meiselas’s Nicaragua: June 1978–July 1979 is a contemporary classic and formative contribution to the literature of concerned photography. In the decades following the original publication, Meiselas has continued to contextualize her photographs and relate them to history as it unfolded. In this new edition, thirty images are linked via QR codes to excerpts from films by the artist, including Pictures from a Revolution (1991, codirected with Richard P. Rogers and Alfred Guzzetti) in which Meiselas tracks down and interviews the people she photographed, and Reframing History (2004, codirected with Alfred Guzzetti), which highlights her collaborations with local communities installing mural-sized images in the places where they were originally taken, eliciting the memories and reflections of those passing by.

By extending and deepening her work, Meiselas asks us “to consider not only the specific timeframe of this book, but to think about the broader perspective of history unfolding, and how in the passage of time a photograph of a single moment in a person’s life shifts its meanings as well as our perception of it.” In an interview from the book, Meiselas speaks with Magnum Foundation’s director, Kristen Lubben, on how the work of this evolving project has been circulated, revisited, and repatriated—and how and why it endures.