Susan Meiselas: Intimate Strangers

Galerie Thomas Zander presents renowned American photographer Susan Meiselas, who is featuring photographs from the dynamic and complex era of the 1970s. This is Meiselas’ first show with the gallery, also including her 1995 video projection “Pandora’s Box.”

The exhibition “Intimate Strangers” juxtaposes two powerful bodies of work by documentary photographer Susan Meiselas. Born in Baltimore in 1948, Meiselas has lived and worked in New York since the 1970s. From 1972 to 1975 she spent her summers photographing and interviewing women who performed striptease for small town carnivals in New England, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina. As she followed the shows from town to town, she portrayed the dancers on stage and off, photographing their public performances as well as their private lives. She taped interviews with the dancers, their boyfriends, the show managers, and paying customers. Meiselas’ frank reveal of the lives of these women brought a hidden world to public attention. Produced at the height of the women’s movement in the ‘70s, the series “Carnival Strippers” reflects the struggle for identity and self-esteem that characterises a complex era of change. The series “Pandora’s Box” (1995) takes us to an exclusive club in 4,000 square feet in a Manhattan loft that describes itself as “a Disneyland of Domination” and advertises “a wild vacation from reality”. Darkly theatrical and yet not staged, these photographs are presented as a video projection in the exhibition and explore opulent rooms and dungeon-like sets in which Mistress Raven and a staff of young women enact formalized rituals of pain and pleasure. These two very different projects give an insight into a world where women work and make choices, but also form and project their own identities. Creating spaces in which her subjects can speak for themselves, Meiselas throws light on our assumptions about social and gender roles, fantasy and power, pornography and self-expression.