Susan Meiselas is looking a bit shaken. She has just heard that her trip to Guinea, scheduled to start the next day, has been canceled; her driver there has been assaulted and is fleeing the country. She is working with Human Rights Watch photographing child domestic workers, and clearly someone didn’t like it.
Her assignment was meant as a sequel to her photographs of Indonesian maids in Singapore last year. “It’s a strange thing to have your knapsack filled with film and cameras and be stopped on track,” she said.
She was in this southern French city to help commemorate the 60th anniversary of Magnum, the photographers’ agency she joined at 26. Some of her work, which covers a range that includes war in Nicaragua and sadomasochism in New York, is on display alongside that of her Magnum colleagues at the city’s annual photographic festival, Les Rencontres d’Arles.
Check it out here.