Susan Meiselas: Nicaragua: June 1978-July 1979, Edited with Claire Rosenberg. Writers and Readers, 1981, £6.95
In July 1979 the people of Nicaragua, led by the Sandinista National Liberation Front, overthrew the brutal dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza. Writing 12 months after the victory, Susan Meiselas observes that the bourgeois media has been [illegible] from Nicaragua 'as if nothing had happened before, as if the roots were not there, and the victory not earned'. She says that this book has been made 'so that we remember'.
The body of the book is a sequence of colour photography during a series of visits to Nicaragua. There are pictures of daily life under Somoza: a woman washing laundry in a sewer of downtown Managua; National Guard recruits being trained in the use of a US-made M-16 rifle.
There are pictures taken during the September [illegible]: a house-to-house search for Sandinistas; volunteers heading for a Sandinista training camp in the mountains north of Esteli. Finally, there are pictures taken during the final offensive, June-July 1979; Sandinistas in the streets of Esteli; a Sandinista playing a clarinet on the barricades during the last days of fighting in Matagalpa; Sandinistas at the walls of the Esteli National Guard headquarters. In fact, the whole population seems to have become Sandinistas.
It is remarkable as a book of war photography. It is one of very few journalistic works that is openly sympathetic to a popular struggle, and not simply humanist in its concerns. Susan Meiselas knows more about the politics of what she is photographing than do most journalists, Though there are a number of photos of fires and burning bodies, there are few images of atrocities. Most of the photos are of people, civilian and guerrilla, and while these people might be suffering they are not seen as victims, not presented as evidence of a general human condition which accuses nobody and everybody in the way of most war photography.
This is even more remarkable in that the photos are in colour. Most colour war photographs, those in Time and Newsweek for example, give way to gore and by doing so transform history into spectacle, Alternatively, colour photography is used most extensively for advertising. It romanticizes its subject, particularly foreign lands. In Meiselas' book the colour, while indicating the tropical surroundings, does not emphasise them. Instead the colour, by revealing the ordinariness of the clothes serves to emphasise the ordinariness of the people.
This is [because the] book is being published simultaneously in several different languages and financial considerations apparently forced this arrangement. The photographs are presented in a single large block without captions or text. The captions, some of which are rather inadequate, appear at the back of the book accompanying small black-and-white reproductions that run alongside the text. This is not Susan Meiselas' fault. But it weakens the book dramatically because the photos lose much of their [meaning]. They become isolated in the way Susan Sontag refers to when she argues that 'through photographs the world becomes a series of unrelated, free-standing particles... and history, past and present, a set of anecdotes and fait divers. The camera makes reality atomic, manageable, opaque. It is a vision [illegible] of the world which denies interconnectedness, continuity, but which confers on each moment the character of mystery.'
This very 'nature' of photography makes a formidable opponent for someone who aims to do what Meiselas does. For this reason it is a fatal mistake to present the photographs without trying to overcome the problem of discontinuity. Despite their subject they cannot by themselves narrate the history which surrounds them.
This absence of a context which could restore the meaning to the photographs is all the more disappointing because it so easily might have been there. The text provided at the back of the book is extremely vivid. It is made up of testimonies, letters and extracts from interviews with Nicaraguans which have been put together with the help of another journalist, Claire Rosenberg. There is a letter sent to National Guard recruits by the Sandinistas; another from Episcopalian bishops sent to President Somoza. There is part of an interview with Marta, a housewife in Esteli; another with Sylvia Reyes, mother of two, organiser of neighbourhood women in Managua; another with Enrique, a fifteen-year-old boy in Managua; Augusto, a taxi-driver in Monimbo and so on.
In some ways the texts show more vividly than the photographs do what was happening in Nicaragua. They indicate the central role which youth played in the Nicaragua revolution, They show that the church was involved in the struggle against the dictatorship: a letter from the Archbishop of Managua in the then bourgeois opposition newspaper, La Prensa, outlining what he sees as the necessary conditions to be met before collective armed resistance can be legitimised; an interview with Father Gaspar Garcia Laviana telling us why he joined the armed struggle.
A different arrangement of the photos with the texts could have gone a long way towards reconstructing the context out of which each photograph was taken.
This could also have been assisted by a grouping of the photographs. At the beginning of the book there is a 'contents' page which tells us that the photos cover three periods in the struggle: June 1978, the Somoza regime; September 1978, Insurrection; and June 1979-July 1979, the Final Offensive, A progression is implied which doesn't really happen, Not only does each photograph remain static, but each image has equal weight. There are no emphases, The viewer is forced into passivity, isolated from an understanding of events.
One final criticism: there are photos of women, women guerrillas as well as women 'victims', but it would be very difficult for someone not familiar with the history of Nicaragua to realise from this book that there was a women's organisation which played an important role in the mobilisation and organisation of women from September 1978 in the period leading up to the final insurrection. It is possible that the photographs contain some of this information, just as they must contain more information about the Sandinista organisation and its relationship to the neighbourhood committees which provided the base for the popular insurrections in many of the towns in Nicaragua. Julia, neighbourhood organiser in Managua tells us that 'after September, we knew we had to get better organised. So we started preparing for the next insurrection by setting up Civil Defence Committees on each block, trying to get first-aid kits for every street where we had clandestine clinics for the fighters. We had to find safe houses for storing medicine, food supplies, and arms.' By themselves the photographs cannot reveal anything of these [illegible].
This is not a naive criticism. The self-organisation of the oppressed is something that bourgeois ideology is devoted to obscuring. In speculating on Susan Sontag's theory of the uses of photography, John Berger argues that 'today no alternative professional (photographic) practice is possible. The system can accommodate any photograph ... Yet it may be possible to begin to use photographs according to a practice addressed to an alternative future. This future is a hope which we need now if we are to maintain a struggle, a resistance, against the societies and culture of capitalism.'