“I don’t see war as heroic, but I saw the necessity of people to fight.”
“Central America was barely in the news when I first left. I read about what was happening in the newspaper, and there weren’t any images. Therefore, there was nothing that said, “I need to be there.” I was curious to understand the circumstances that were determining this conflict: a dictatorship that the United States had supported for a long period of time; a family in power — the Samosas; and this popular movement that was growing….”
“In my mind the thing that I was most criticized for, which seems ironic now, is that I was working in color at a time when very few people had worked in color previously. It was mostly a black-and-white tradition. And color was seen as aestheticizing violence.”
“I look back to my work as responding to what I was seeing. I didn’t have images in my head. People look at a photograph I made, that people called Molotov Man, as a gesture that mimics Robert Capa’s A Fallen Soldier. I don’t think that image was really etched in my mind when I was making that image.” — July 8, 2009
Meiselas appears in “No Job For a Woman”: The Women Who Fought to Report WWII.
Photograph by Tara Sgroi, 2009.
