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Nicaragua: June 1978–July 1979
Originally published in 1981, and now in a third edition, Susan Meiselas’s Nicaragua is a contemporary classic—a seminal contribution to the literature of concerned photography.
Nicaragua: June 1978–July 1979 forms an extraordinary narrative of a nation in turmoil. Starting with a powerful and chilling evocation of the Somoza regime during its decline in the late 1970s, the images trace the evolution of the popular resistance that led to the triumph of the Sandinista revolution in 1979. The book includes interviews with various participants in the revolution, along with letters, poems, and statistics. In the decades following the original publication, Meiselas has continued to contextualize her photographs and relate them to history as it unfolded. Multiple editions build upon this body of work to evoke and conjure up the reality of people’s lives and aspirations, their victories and disappointments.
In this new edition, thirty images are linked via QR codes to excerpts from the films Pictures from a Revolution (1991, codirected with Richard P. Rogers and Alfred Guzzetti) in which Meiselas tracks down and interviews the people she photographed, and Reframing History (2004, codirected with Alfred Guzzetti), her collaboration with local communities in installing mural-sized images in the places where they were originally taken, eliciting the memories and reflections of those passing by. By extending and deepening her work, Meiselas asks us “to consider not only the specific timeframe of this book, but to think about the broader perspective of history unfolding, and how in the passage of time a photograph of a single moment in a person’s life shifts its meanings as well as our perception of it.”
An interview with the artist by Magnum Foundation’s director, Kristen Lubben, addresses how the work of this evolving project has been circulated, revisited, and repatriated—and how and why it endures.
Nicaragua: June 1978–July 1979 forms an extraordinary narrative of a nation in turmoil. Starting with a powerful and chilling evocation of the Somoza regime during its decline in the late 1970s, the images trace the evolution of the popular resistance that led to the triumph of the Sandinista revolution in 1979. The book includes interviews with various participants in the revolution, along with letters, poems, and statistics. In the decades following the original publication, Meiselas has continued to contextualize her photographs and relate them to history as it unfolded. Multiple editions build upon this body of work to evoke and conjure up the reality of people’s lives and aspirations, their victories and disappointments.
In this new edition, thirty images are linked via QR codes to excerpts from the films Pictures from a Revolution (1991, codirected with Richard P. Rogers and Alfred Guzzetti) in which Meiselas tracks down and interviews the people she photographed, and Reframing History (2004, codirected with Alfred Guzzetti), her collaboration with local communities in installing mural-sized images in the places where they were originally taken, eliciting the memories and reflections of those passing by. By extending and deepening her work, Meiselas asks us “to consider not only the specific timeframe of this book, but to think about the broader perspective of history unfolding, and how in the passage of time a photograph of a single moment in a person’s life shifts its meanings as well as our perception of it.”
An interview with the artist by Magnum Foundation’s director, Kristen Lubben, addresses how the work of this evolving project has been circulated, revisited, and repatriated—and how and why it endures.
128 pages, Hardcover
First published April 12, 1981
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About the author
Susan Meiselas
45 books9 followersSusan Meiselas is a documentary photographer based in New York. She is the author of Carnival Strippers (1976), Nicaragua (1981), Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History (1997), Pandora’s Box (2001), Encounters with the Dani (2003) Prince Street Girls (2016), A Room Of Their Own (2017), Tar Beach (2020), and Carnival Strippers Revisited (2022).
Meiselas is well known for her documentation of human rights issues in Latin America. Her photographs are included in North American and international collections. In 1992 she was made a MacArthur Fellow and received a Guggenheim Fellowship (2015). Most recently, she received the first Women in Motion Award from Kering and the Rencontres d’Arles (2019), the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize (2019), and the Erich Salomon Award of the German Society for Photography (2022). Mediations, a survey exhibition of her work from the 1970s to present was initiated by the Jeu de Paume in Paris and traveled to Fundació Antoni Tàpies, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Instituto Moreira Salles in São Paulo, among others.
Meiselas has been the President of the Magnum Foundation since 2007, with a mission to expand diversity and creativity in documentary photography.
Meiselas is well known for her documentation of human rights issues in Latin America. Her photographs are included in North American and international collections. In 1992 she was made a MacArthur Fellow and received a Guggenheim Fellowship (2015). Most recently, she received the first Women in Motion Award from Kering and the Rencontres d’Arles (2019), the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize (2019), and the Erich Salomon Award of the German Society for Photography (2022). Mediations, a survey exhibition of her work from the 1970s to present was initiated by the Jeu de Paume in Paris and traveled to Fundació Antoni Tàpies, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Instituto Moreira Salles in São Paulo, among others.
Meiselas has been the President of the Magnum Foundation since 2007, with a mission to expand diversity and creativity in documentary photography.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
October 15, 2018
This book really grabs you and asks you to travel far beyond anything resembling a bourgeois comfort zone. It brought me back to the 80s when my parents were living in Texas and I was a student and staying with them to work and save some money. I was still a Catholic then, and the local church was visited by some Franciscan priests who were working in Nicaragua, along with some survivors of the time of Somoza, the very end of which is examined in this book of photo reportage. The Nicaraguans told us about the atrocities that they had witnessed, both under the Somoza regime and by the more recent Contras, and warned those of us there about American support for them. They were preaching to a very small choir, I'm afraid.
I'll leave the evaluation of this important book to the late great John Berger:
"Susan Meiselas's extraordinary photographs take us right inside a revolutionary movement and speak on behalf of its participants. Yet unlike most photographs of such material, these refuse all the rhetoric normally associated with such pictures: the rhetoric of violence, revolutionary heroism, and the glorification of misery. Here we have the feeling of real people, members of a real community. And this community has reached an important moment in its history. By working in color, Meiselas has posed another difficulty for herself. Color photographs of this kind of subject inevitably give way to gore or to the aesthetization of violence. Here, instead, we have enormous control, a sense of the everyday, and a vitality rooted in an active community."
I'll leave the evaluation of this important book to the late great John Berger:
"Susan Meiselas's extraordinary photographs take us right inside a revolutionary movement and speak on behalf of its participants. Yet unlike most photographs of such material, these refuse all the rhetoric normally associated with such pictures: the rhetoric of violence, revolutionary heroism, and the glorification of misery. Here we have the feeling of real people, members of a real community. And this community has reached an important moment in its history. By working in color, Meiselas has posed another difficulty for herself. Color photographs of this kind of subject inevitably give way to gore or to the aesthetization of violence. Here, instead, we have enormous control, a sense of the everyday, and a vitality rooted in an active community."
June 21, 2025
Revue au long cour de la révolution santiniste, cohabitation macro/micro ou petite et grande histoire. Meiselas ne cède pas à l’hypocrisie de la photo se suffisant à elle même. Le texte nous donne le contexte nécessaire.
May 7, 2013
Fantastic collection of photographs. And the companion documentary where the author goes back to Nicaragua and finds all the people from the pictures in the book or their relatives and talks to them.
Brilliant photographs, brilliant documentary.
Brilliant photographs, brilliant documentary.
July 17, 2022
Absolutely beautiful images that capture a difficult time in the country's history.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews