Susan Meiselas photographed the civil wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador, the refugees in the border area between Mexico and the United States, the persecution of the Kurds in northern Iraq and domestic violence in a run-down industrial region in central England.

Nevertheless, it is not the images of human suffering and unleashed violence that stand out in the Berlin retrospective of her life's work.

Andrew Kilb

Feature correspondent in Berlin.

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The most vividly remembered shots are those of seeing and being seen, willed and forced exposure, the price of nudity, and the ambiguous triumph of voyeurism.

These are photos that really catch the eye.

Meiselas, born in Baltimore in 1948, began making photo series in the early 1970s about her neighbors in a Cambridge boarding house and country people in the southern states of South Carolina and Mississippi.

But the project that made her famous and earned her inclusion in the Magnum Photo Agency is the Carnival Strippers, begun in 1973 and completed in 1975.

Meiselas had discovered the strippers, who undressed in tent bars at fairs and let visitors touch them for a corresponding extra charge, on their trips through New England.

Her photographs document the women's everyday work as well as the look and behavior of their customers; they are a study of the milieu, a description of gender relations and a portrait gallery at the same time.

The truth hits you at c/o Berlin, where you move on from the diary-like text-image combinations of the series "44 Irving Street" and the almost lyrical group portraits of the "Prince Street Girls" from Manhattan's Little Italy to the pictures from New England of the "Carnival Strippers" like a slap.

Suddenly there is nothing left of joie de vivre, adolescence or a sense of home.

You see naked and semi-naked women marked by stretch marks, surgical scars, alcohol and obesity and the faces of the customers they present themselves to.

But one also recognizes that the environment in which the women appear is a distorted image of a society in which sex and money are inextricably linked.

In this engine room of the American Dream, the pursuit of bliss becomes a parody of desire.

But Meiselas gives the objects of this sad instinctual economy a dignity that puts them on a par with queens and movie stars.

In the strippers she finds the image of man as woman under the traces of damaged life.

The shock that stands at the beginning of her photographic work turns into an aesthetic of compassion when you look at it.

These photos are beautiful because they show what is - or what was fifty years ago and persists today in a different, time-specific form.

In an essay in the brochure that c/o Berlin published for the exhibition, the American art historian Abigail Solomon-Godeau reports on the disturbed reaction of a group of art students who saw Meiselas' photographs in a Paris exhibition.

What irritated the seminar participants was not the imbalance in power between the customers and organizers of the strip shows and the women appearing in them, but the imperfection of the naked bodies: "The circumstances that led to the strippers doing this work as a factory job or other physical work preferred, were of no interest at all.

For the students, the obscene scandal lay in the exposure of mortal flesh to everyday women.”