Susan Meiselas will receive the Outstanding Contribution to Photography Award from the Sony World Photography Awards 2025.
Meiselas is a decorated documentarian who has covered a wide range of topics that include insurrection in Nicaragua and carnival strippers in New England.
The Baltimore-born photographer’s work often focuses on the stories of women. In the 1970s, she embarked on a project about girls growing up in Little Italy, New York entitled Prince Street Girls.
Her first major photography project documented strippers at New England fairs and carnivals, which she worked on during summers while teaching in the New York City public schools. Carnival Strippers (1972-75) documents the onstage and offstage experiences of women doing striptease at small-town carnivals across New England, capturing both their performative and private lives, counter-balanced with a collage of voices of all the participants, from the girl show manager to the women on stage and the men in the audience.
But it was her coverage of the Nicaraguan Revolution that led to international fame. Embedded with the Sandinista rebels, she captured iconic images that brought global attention to the country’s struggle and became defining visual records of the era. Her photograph of a Sandinista rebel throwing a Molotov cocktail, famously dubbed Molotov Man, became a symbol of the Sandinista revolution and her photos have been incorporated into local textbooks in Nicaragua.
Meiselas has also documented women escaping domestic violence in the U.K., human rights issues in Latin America, and has compiled a photographic history of Kurdistan.
“I am honored to receive this Award for my contribution to the ever-expanding world of photography,” Meiselas says per a press release.
“Over the past 50 years, I have had the privilege of witnessing history being made, sharing the often unseen lives of those engaged in its making.
“The work on display invites reflection not only on the photographs themselves but also on the relationships that shaped and inspired them.”
Excerpts of five projects by Meiselas will be on view at London’s Somerset House (April 17 to May 5, 2025). Drawing from her earliest bodies of work, 44 Irving Street, Prince Street Girls and Carnival Strippers, to her later projects Pandora’s Box and A Room of Their Own, the exhibition traces recurring thematic elements Meiselas has cultivated in her practice, focussing on what is often hidden from public view.
Meiselas follows Sebastião Salgado who received the Outstanding Contribution to Photography Awards last year.