Sony honours photography icon Susan Meiselas as she sounds alarm on AI and image integrity

LONDON, April 17 — For over 50 years legendary American photographer Susan Meiselas has pushed the boundaries of her craft and captivated audiences with her intimate portraits — from Nicaraguan rebels to US carnival strippers.

But she told AFP she hoped there would still be room for her work to evolve, after receiving the prestigious Outstanding Contribution to Photography prize at the Sony World Photography Awards 2025 yesterday.

The lifetime award “has some finality to it,” the 76-year-old said, flanked by her photos at a new exhibition celebrating her career at London’s Somerset House.

It’s a characteristic concern for a documentary photographer who has always tried to prolong her work beyond the split-second snapshot and extend it outside the frame.

Meiselas, who is also foundation president of the renowned Magnum photo agency, was praised by the competition’s judges for her “deeply engaged” approach, with photos often taken over many years and accompanied by follow-up interviews.

“I didn’t like the feeling of just grabbing a photograph and moving on,” Meiselas told AFP, explaining how her style developed in the 1970s.

“Some people are brilliant at it, but it didn’t feed me. It didn’t make me feel that it was the right balance.

“Seeing and building relationships over time and looking at photographs and sharing them just became the way that I was most comfortable to work,” she said.

This outlook underpins the photos on show in London — from a multi-year project started in the mid-1970s that charts the lives of girls growing up in New York’s Little Italy, to more recent work about women living in domestic violence refuge centres in England’s Black Country region.

One section from her project “44 Irving Street” shows how, as a Harvard university student, Meiselas photographed her boarding house neighbours — then asked for their handwritten reactions, which she displayed alongside the images.

Another area is devoted to her famous “Carnival Strippers” project, which saw Meiselas travel with women who performed striptease shows at smalltown US carnivals from 1972 to 1975.

The resulting photos peer behind the male gaze and offer an intimate look at the lives of the women performing.

‘Whole new frontier’

Meiselas told AFP that working as a woman in a field dominated by men had granted her access to subjects and perspectives that may have been off-limits for her male colleagues.

She wonders whether it may also have informed her “immersive approach of getting closer,” as opposed to a “take and get and go” attitude to photography.

But Meiselas is concerned that today, the intimate connection involved in taking a photo like this is under threat.

With the rise of social media and artificial intelligence, she said, it is harder to preserve the kind of “social contract” that has allowed her to earn the trust of her subjects and to exercise some control over what happens to the work.

At times, the unexpected afterlife of a photo has been a source of success for Meiselas — as with “Molotov Man”, her picture of Sandinista rebel Pablo Jesus Arauz throwing a Pepsi bottle petrol bomb, which came to symbolise the Nicaraguan revolution in 1979 after resonating beyond its immediate context.

But AI represents “a whole new frontier,” Meiselas said.

“I don’t want to lose that connection from the very first moment of trust and sharing, to then not being able to protect how the picture gets reinterpreted and reinserted into other kinds of dialogues that I’m not part of,” she said.

“I don’t know that anyone’s pictures are going to be protected.”

Meiselas’s work will be on display at Somerset House until May 5. — AFP