Susan Meiselas was twenty-four years old when she began photographing the women of carnival strip shows, in 1972. The following three summers, at small-town fairgrounds on the East Coast, she captured the performers both onstage and off, nude and not, in dim, makeshift dressing rooms or outdoors in sunshine, against a shifting backdrop of box trucks, tents, and painted plywood sets

Magnum photographer Susan Meiselas has spent five decades questioning the practice of photography. But whether it’s documenting the lives of showgirls or an unfolding revolution, her open-ended approach gives the images a life of their own.

The work of American photographer Susan Meiselas is the subject of a traveling retrospective exhibition currently on view at the Jeu de Paume in Paris, France and opening in July at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. “Mediations,” which is accompanied by a catalogue published by Damiani, brings together a selection of series from the 1970s to the present, calling attention to Meiselas’s photographic approach and her lifelong commitment to engage in a “cycle of return” with her subjects, going back to the communities she has photographed and sharing the work with them. The exhibition also demonstrates how Meiselas has found ways to extend narratives beyond a photographic frame by using audio, film and archival materials to build layered stories that include multiple perspectives. The retrospective follows on the heels of her book On the Frontline, a memoir about her career published last fall by Aperture. In it, she discusses the experiences, motivations and ideas that shaped different, yet connected, bodies of work.

In her new photo-memoir, the photographer returns to the origin of her career to reflect on all she’s remembered, and why it’s worth remembering.