Susan Meiselas On Photographing “Carnival Strippers” At The Girls Show Striptease

Initially overlooked upon publication, Magnum photographer Susan Meiselas’ book Carnival Strippers is having a long overdue revival. As she opens a landmark retrospective of her work in Berlin, Meiselas speaks to Grace Banks about the true meaning behind a radical project that’s now being revisited as a seminal feminist text.

In 1972 Susan Meiselas was a twenty-four year old New Yorker, barely identifying as the storied Magnum photographer she’s known as today. What she did know was that she had an unrelenting ambition to document American women’s lives during the time of huge social change that the second wave feminist movement had created. It was the height of the women’s liberation movement and Meiselas was at the center of it. Gloria Steinem had just delivered her address to American women at the 1971 Washington National Women’s Political Caucus in the intense summer heat, and Flo Kennedy had recently released her seminal book on abortion, Abortion Rap, one of the first female-authored books on the topic to have been published at the time.

Mesielas had started that seminal year working on a self-funded project photographing state fairs in New England, Pennsylvania and South Carolina. In the first few weeks of this project, she noticed a tent called The Girls Show, where inside women were dancing and stripping for an audience of men. It was a sight that surprised Meiselas. “This was bang in the middle of the women’s liberation movement” she tells me, “but here we had these women being paraded. It made me realise how differently feminism was impacting women’s lives across different economic backgrounds in America.”

Meiselas wanted to explore this lack of parity further and resolved to spend every summer between 1972 and 1975 traveling around the country photographing the women of The Girls Show. To avoid the series being misinterpreted as a glamorization of the often difficult lives of these women, Meiselas interviewed every woman she shot, transcribing their hours-long conversations and publishing them in the book Carnival Strippers.

First released in 1975 with New York publishing house Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Meiselas’s book has been somewhat overlooked since publication. A peer of Susan Sontag, Gloria Steinem and Flo Kennedy, Meiselas faced criticism for aggrandising the hard work of working as a strip club dancer. But with over twenty in-depth profiles of the women she photographed conducted over half a decade, the book provides a critical, rare insight into the lives of working class women in the 1970s on the East Coast states in America. “The second wave feminist movement was incredible” Meiselas says, “ we also know that it did focus on the experiences of upper class women. I’m a documentary photographer, I wanted to expose the social and economic choices of the women dancing at The Girls Show. The accompanying interviews, where women detail the abuse and marginalization they’ve suffered in order to earn money, make that clear.”

Carnival Strippers has recently been reissued through Steidl Books – following an exhibition of the photographs at Magnum’s Paris gallery – and has garnered a new wave of recognition as an overlooked but seminal feminist text exploring the economic choices of working class women in the ‘70s. “I felt their words were equally as important as my photographs” Meiselas says of the interviews, “and we need to hear the voices of these women.”

In her 2005 research paper The Performance of Sexuality in Exotic Dance Clubs, University of Arizona professor of sociology Dr Mary Nell Trautner looks at the ways “strip clubs construct sexuality to be consistent with client class norms and assumptions.” Meiselas explores this construction in Carnival Strippers, showing the male gaze of the audience in her photographs as an overpowering eye of a dominant spectator. Meiselas offers an analysis of how The Girls Show constructed a type of public sexuality that’s both gendered as well as specifically classed, “a class performance, as much as a gender performance,” Meiselas says.

The year after finishing the series, Meiselas gained membership to Magnum Photos. It’s a coveted position within an institution that’s helped her become one of the most respected documentary photographers of our time. “Without a doubt, Carnival Strippers has shaped the way I approach my subjects as a documentary photographer. The fact these women were dancers in a strip club didn’t make a difference, it was an incredible way to learn how to document the female experience.”

Meiselas has since gone on to photograph a wide range of subjects, from the civil rights movement in Nicaragua to the poverty of Downtown New York in the 1970s. These works are all brought together in a landmark exhibition of her work at Berlin’s photography gallery C/O Berlin that spans her fifty-year career. Ahead of the exhibition, she shares her thoughts on class, feminism, and the eternal appeal of photographing women.

Grace Banks: For Carnival Strippers you spent three years interviewing the women you photographed, editing these conversations into insightful essays on the impact of feminism on working class women in the early 1970s. What did you find out that surprised you about these women?

Susan Meiselas: I came from a completely different economic context and meeting these women was a real turning point in my feminist thinking. Lena, for example, one of the women who I came to know very well over a longer period, I remember when she first came to the fairground I happened to be there. And she said to the manager of the show and said she needed a job. And he asked what she could do, and she simply said she could dance. I say this because in other words, many women at the time thought stripping was nothing, it was a means to an end.

When I interviewed her, she went on to tell me what her alternatives were. When she was a waitress, men would pinch her. When she worked in a factory, her bosses would grab her. When she tried to leave her husband, he took the wheels off of her car and left her stranded. A lot of those women were trying to escape – they were run away girls. But of course, the open road is a fantasy, you know, it’s a dream space. It was all about economics and trying to find a way to support themselves. When women have no cash in their pocket, they make very different choices to women who are financially secure. That’s why I wanted to interview every woman I shot.

GB: When the photos were released in 1975, you faced criticism that the images glamorized the objectification of women. Now the book Carnival Strippers is being reissued, many now realize that you weren’t trying to sugarcoat the experience, but document it. How do you feel about that criticism now, and what did the women you were shooting make of it?

SM: My real hope was to give the women I met a voice. I spent a lot of time speaking with them and they trusted me, I always felt confident in my goals for the project. I mean, obviously, in a dressing room, you have to get permission for access from the manager. But the women have to want you there, and they wanted me there.

For them, I don’t think they would have been making a capitalist analysis about their role as a worker, at all. I don’t think they would have been thinking about unionizing or anything like that. They were thinking of their own personal freedom and wanting to control their lives.

GB: You also took pictures of the men in the audience. How did you want to present the male gaze on these women?

SM: This is why the written aspect of Carnival Strippers is so important. In the interviews, the women talk pretty openly about what it feels like to be sexually assaulted – being touched and grabbed – that was pretty astounding for me to hear and it was very important for me to include it in the book. The men might be the predominant gaze in that room, but I present them as slightly clueless.

Recently, when I went back to look at the transcriptions of my interviews, of which there were a lot, I was astounded at how deep some of these exchanges were and how much we learn through them about the lives of working class women in the 1970s.

GB: You’ve worked as a documentary photographer for the last five decades. In that time you’ve shot in Nicaragua, America and Chile. How did the Carnival Strippers series impact your future work as a documentary photographer?

SM: I carried the values that I evolved in Carnival Strippers throughout my career. It really was my first documentary project and I completely immersed myself. I also didn’t have a commission, it was a self-funded project. At the time I was seen as this woman that had made these photographs of strippers, what would I know? And after that, when nobody hired me to go to Nicaragua, I sent myself too. But it was because of the Carnival Strippers portfolio that I entered Magnum photos, it was a seminal project for me.

GB: How did the series impact your Nicaraguan portfolio on a technical level?

SM: When I went back to look at the images for the reprint of Carnival Strippers, I realized that I had shot in color too and that I had kind of forgotten about it. In the Nicaraguan series, I’m shooting color with black and white alongside, just as I did in Carnival Strippers.

I had a certain way of working throughout the period of the 1970s that was very consistent for me, which I really think Carnival Strippers started. There are probably two kinds of commonalities. One is this notion of self determination, that’s a really common theme in the Nicaragua and Carnival Strippers series, the women I photograph there are struggling for self determination.

And I think the other thing, in terms of photographic practice, is immersion. This idea of immersion and total engagement. Today, unfortunately, most photographers aren’t supported by publications to be shooting in places for very long. This idea of a photographer immersing themselves in a project and really committing to it, for me, that all came from Carnival Strippers.

Susan Meiselas Mediations runs from 30 April – 9 September at C/O Gallery in Berlin, Germany.