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| In the early 1970s, Susan Meiselas frequented small town New England carnivals, documenting the affiliated strip shows, their performers, employees and customers. The photographs possess an ambiguity which is born of a thorough and uncompromising fidelity to this surprisingly convoluted social network. They are sometimes grotesque, sometimes elegiac, always complex, and the result is a more tangible and intricate pattern of humanity, antithetical to what might have been mere propaganda. Carnival Strippers was one of Meiselas' first projects as a professional photographer. Her photographs have subsequently been widely published, and she is the recipient of the 1992 MacArthur Fellowship. The publication with which this exhibition coincides is the second edition of Carnival Strippers, revisited and revised after twenty-seven years. | ||