Susan Meiselas

In the early 1970s, Susan Meiselas frequented small town New England carnivals, documenting the affiliated strip shows, their performers, employees and customers. The advancing women's movement of the era is the most obvious frame through which to regard Meiselas' consideration of this inflammatory subject. Meiselas' photographs share with the work of her contemporaries an ambiguity which is born not of descriptive inadequacy, but a thorough and uncompromising fidelity to her subject. Meiselas makes no reductions for the sake of indulgence or symbolic simplicity. The dramatis personae of Poverty, Oppression and Dignity are nowhere in evidence within Meiselas' bizarre microcosm.