Intimate Strangers

Susan Meiselas

Info: 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. (…)