Susan Meiselas Quotes

I think photography has a huge potential to expand a circle of knowledge. There's a reality that we are all the more linked globally and we have to know about each other. Photography gives us that opportunity.

There is so much more to the things that we think we know from afar. The close you get the more complex it is, not the simpler it is to understand.

I see myself in [the] tradition of encounter and witness - a witness that sees the photograph as evidence.

Finding a photograph is often like picking up a piece from a jigsaw-puzzle box with the cover missing. There’s no sense of the whole. Each image is a mysterious part of something not yet revealed.

If Instagram had been available when I was working in Nicaragua in 1978, I'm sure I would have wanted to use it as a way of reporting directly from the streets during the insurrection.

The camera is an excuse to be someplace you otherwise don't belong. It gives me both a point of connection and a point of separation.

I'm deeply interested in the photograph as a record of an encounter and enjoy putting myself in a timeline of image-makers, alongside other travelers, such as anthropologists, colonists, missionaries, even tourists. I do that to emphasize subjectivity, rather than privilege any single perspective - I see myself as only one of many storytellers.

For a long time I've lived with the inadequacy of that frame to tell everything I knew, and I think a lot about what is outside of the frame.

What worries me is that we want to close down our relationship to the world at large. In other words, people's instincts are overwhelmed by the amount of images, or they can't distinguish anymore between Rwanda or Bosnia or Somalia.

We know photographers make frames, but we deeply believe they can also create frameworks.