 Exhibition is a tendency to be trusted from Susan's work. Although Susan's work is very difficult to deal with, we trust it in a sense, because we don't have words to use, the fact that in the day-to-day, you're only finding the quotes and maybe if you're in the east floor, we have one of the best-known works she did in the 70s, Cardinal Strippers, which is that essay photographic reportage over there. And this is the work that sort of made her reserve the acknowledgement of the purpose of the English and most of the English magnum photos in 1976. But the exhibition starts with early work from the 70s, and it is a work that, it's not only being worked, it was something she had bad, and then it very religiously acquired the quality of work. And I like to say that, because when you look at 44 years in history, these series on the left and on the right, it's a work that she made early on in her dorm, she was a student. So the photographs you have here are photographs that were not made to be final copies or final prints for the, you know, work, for the projects you have to do at school. And the contouring, these were the contacts she used to get in contact with the people in the dorm. So this is kind of a wave understanding photography already quite substantially different than the video of taking a photo, making a nice brain, and then making it straight. This is the very beginning when she's attempting to kind of give back the image and also get back common feedback from the seeker for the person who is being photographed. So this is a work that we have literally taken out from although kind of a bunch of these photographs already exist in the Harvard collection, Harvard University collection. This is a work that we recompose and we again present as work, even though I mean many of the prints were lost, many of the comments have not been kept over time. So these kind of elusive quality as work, it's something that really interests me. Because then the next work, the portraits, it is again serious photographs made in 1973 in Mississippi. What you get to see here is not the work. It's the proof, the first prints she made out of negatives. But then the real work are the postcards she sent back before they had been photographed. Of course those postcards are now difficult to recuperate. So from the curatorial point of view it's interesting or we have, let's say, the capacity to transform something that was not just a simple process, but it was a deeper understanding of work into work. So we brought it, we framed it, and I personally tried to frame it making it look like almost similar to the rest of the work leading up to Cardinal's 3rd verse in 1976. So this is the inside story of how our work is presented because the photographic practice, it moves through intuition, urges, necessities, she has already said. And to relativize this work, we also have the dreams and the archive where we look at the many notes, many handwritten comments that she normally ends up scribbling over time while she's doing projects. And I'd like to draw your attention to the huge number of letters she exchanged with the women she photographed with four Cardinal's 2nd verse, which is kind of a pinnacle of modern photography because it's kind of a reportage style. Shortly before, she'd been assistant with Fredic Weisman for Titi Catfouille. So you see that Susan is coming from this social documentary tradition, but at the same time she's slowly becoming skeptical about the way of understanding this social documentary or the implicit ideas of justice in this type of work. So... How should we do this? Well, because it's a limited time for all of you, you're exhausted, you've been listening all day. I listened only in the morning, so you must be exhausted. I don't know how much you want us to walk you just with a few ideas in different sections. So, Kailash, I think the other thing that, in this process, when you go back 40 years, you start to think about things. And one aspect of curatorial process is what you hear from someone outside of your process. What Kailash was just saying, and also Pia, Viewing, who's in the Juddapam, took notice of the idea of place. So I want to emphasize that because here you feel place, the boundaries of place, which turn out to have a fairly consistent structure in a lot of the work I do, which I never really consciously thought, I'm looking for places. But I begin in a small place, which is my own boarding house where I'm living. I go to people's homes where I don't enter because it's so private. And then the next section is about my neighborhood, girls who live on the block that I live on in New York. And when you think about the girl show, it's a physical thing that moves in a truck. It's a place where many things happen. So in a way, even ending with Pandora's box, it's a place. So something about this whole floor links place. And then downstairs you start to feel place is a country, is a history. So place also has a very strong role or the desire for a place like the Kurds not having a homeland. So I think place resonates. More than we, you know, I consciously was thinking about it. And yet even the last work, A Room of Their Own, is all about the place of the rooms that I showed you and the place of the refuge, which is a way to escape and be protected. So it's kind of strange to discover a theme, a sub-theme in your work, you know, 40 plus years later. So this takes a lot of time to look at. I think we can just pass by, but discovering bits and pieces of your own process is the only reason I found it is because I never left my place. I've lived in the same literally studio for 43 years. So that explains the sediment, you know. You have a lot of stuff. This is one chapter that we haven't talked about. I worked in a small mill town. This is really the first archival project where I teach young people. They go back to their families. They find the photographs that were made of the generations that have stayed in this town. And we do a collective exhibition in 1975 of this one town and the people, the families that stayed in this one town. The Prince Street Girls material is related to this center. And then you see carnival strippers. Another thing I didn't mention before, but we talked about repatriation. Part of not only giving a photograph in a polaroid, but bringing back prints and you can see little notations. These are things that the girls, the women liked and I would go for a weekend. I brought them the contact sheets the next weekend of what I had photographed. They would then say, we'd like, I like this photograph. I like that photograph. So it was an intercombeal, right from the beginning. Some of Lena's letters, which are just an example, when I start to prepare the book, she writes down what she thinks should be said in part of her text. This is another very strange bit. I mean, it's too much to talk about in a quick way, but the book strippers, which you see here, becomes, I take all the audio, which is several, maybe, I don't know, a hundred plus hours of audio, listening to the women, the managers, the clients, and transcribe it. So that's my notebook of transcription. Utility undercover. Sorry? Utility undercover. Not undercover? No. Not undercover. Not like with your sneaky iPhone. No. I don't know. A big clunky audio recorder that looked like this. I could have put it in the case. And I capture their interactions. You know, sometimes it's the manager talking to the girls. Sometimes it's between the girls. I transcribe it all, and that becomes the text for the book. So you hear in the first edition of the book, and you can hear it on the two. You can hear a collage of those voices. The first way that Strippers was presented was not as a book, it was an exhibition where you heard the live sound, which I've always believed was the best way, but in this setting it was impossible. So at the Jeu de Paume in Paris, we'll have the original sound, the way I first conceived the show. The interesting thing I was going to point to is that a young Puerto Rican playwright reads the book and wants to make a play from the text. So he creates a play from the text, which is their actual words. And Lena, this young woman, goes with me to the opening night to see herself re-performed three years later. It's quite a wild kind of little story. So there's stories within stories, and we don't have time. This is, you know, a very different... This is Lulu who was a burlesque star who did work with the carnival, extremely funny, and gives me all the vocabulary of the things that relate. You know, it's how you could... the anthropology of, you know, the ethnography of the striptease world. I mean, she's telling me what it means to be... who's the bouncer, what it means to be... burn out a spot, or to valley, or to blow off, or to carny, or a... et cetera. She gives me the vocabulary. So she educates me about what I'm seeing, what I don't know the history of. And then this is some of the background work for Pandora's Box, which I know is very difficult work. I think it's surprising when you look at it, especially from afar, to realize that this work was done 95, so 22 years ago. So I enter a loft, a 10,000-square-foot loft. There's also someone named Nick Broomfield who's making a film there. It's just a very seductive place. And I spend three weeks kind of immersed in this little world that's private. So, you know, part of what I've also included is the catalog, because this show was part of a show I did at the Canal de Isabel in Madrid some years ago with carnival strippers and Pandora's Box. The show is called Intimate Strangers, and I always thought that there was a relationship between carnival strippers and Pandora's Box, 20 years apart, right? So these are some of the comments that, again, you know, very often when you're in a process of doing an exhibition, you never get the feedback. You never know what people are thinking or feeling or take away. So I think that's another part of the incomplete circle, artistically, you know? So this just gives hints. This is the form that the men sign when for whatever it is they want done upon them, they choose the weapon, meaning the means by which and the intensity they want the violence upon them. So maybe I just, I don't know, Carla, should we say ten minutes and you float around because maybe more than my speaking, you get to choose a corner and then we'll go downstairs and point out. Yeah? Yeah, if you have questions, you can come but otherwise you might want to just experience something. This is Nicaragua and the Nicaraguan people. Susan with her sort of staunch, doubtful attitude went back to the world and sort of exploded her own narrative, her own cultural narrative, her own historical narrative. And these were first exhibited in 1982, 1984 in England. And for me it always has presented like the key word in Susan's career. This is very difficult to say because I mean someone else may come and say, well, this is important work. For me it is really important because it acknowledges the circulation of images as part of the production of images. So even though the book has been published, it acknowledges the fact that those images are still alive, generating new meanings or even portraying original meanings. So the interesting thing about this work is all the sequels, the critical sequels she will actually make. In 1984 she will do real produced voyages and of a film in collaboration with Mark Karling in which their exchanges, their letters provide the voice over commenting on every single image and always with a very doubtful attitude or very hesitant attitude towards what the name seemed or might have been. Then in 1981 she produced with Alfred Nuzetti Dick Rogers pictures from a revolution and then in 2004, reframing history these murals were made with that moment for the 25th anniversary of the Sandinista Revolution. So what we get in this space is like several layers. So the historical moment cannot be grasped by one single image. It's like a layer of a layer. This is what we really try to convey. I think this is one of the first times that you ever exhibited these murals next to the photographs. Well, next to mediation. And then flanking up these, we have El Salvador which is a very straight photojournalistic work and I say straight because it's when she feels a sense of urgency towards what she has to represent denounce and convey but on the other hand a very different sense of urgency is that role representing the life of the revolution the life of a fighter and the life of three different chapters. So the year installing this work this way is to provide the work with a dialogical approach so that the work is never something completely finished that has sort of a permanent stable meaning but it's always unsettled by work done in the future. That's why when she started to work on Kurdistan I really believe she already knew that that was going to take years and because of that she also committed to represent not only the last recent event of the massacre but a hundred years of history through the very history of photography itself. It's a very lucky thing in life to have a curator who understands you so well and speaks so beautifully. So no I think that's I mean the monitors are each of those films pictures from revolution voyages and reframing history but of course you can't you don't have time to watch any of them. I don't know what else we can add to that the case shows you the book that I referred to earlier the work of 30 photographers and you know I think the only part of the show that I've worried about is exactly that wall and partly because of what you've all been thinking about and studying all day this question of how you portray violence this isn't public like on the street but it is public in the sense of an exhibition where there are layers of history behind almost every one of those images so just to give you a small corner of what leaves me unsettled or wondering what more we could do and we did have ideas and we should also talk about this app but just to give you a quick from where we're standing if you look at the images on the top the last two images and the one just below it this is of the El Mosote Massacre which is known to have been the largest massacre in Latin America historically and the woman above when we were talking about witness she gave testimony she was the only one of the very few survivors the first person to tell us about how many people had been killed in Mosote that massacre was denied by the State Department the U.S. State Department and just to the right of Rufina you see this hillside which is the training of the Atalcat Battalion who were the people that actually did the massacre in 1980 so I think again that's a much larger story to tell all we do is we have a representation in the case of a magazine called about Mosote which was the New Yorker magazine gave the entire magazine over to the investigation so just as an example of layers and layers where do you begin and end it's the biggest challenge for all of us the other thing just to add to layers and I don't know how quickly it will work on my phone the other thing which was pictures of a revolution where I described earlier going back ten years later and finding the people in some of the photographs the other thing I did when we reprinted the book which is now in print the third edition we created something called the look and listen app and we did that here so that if you have a Spanish phone the film is in English and Spanish and look and listen is a free app and what you do is you when you see this icon it's not the icon like a QR code but it's the image that right away is recognized and it cuts to it cuts to the film now I don't have enough wifi my phone because I'm not registered do you have yours so the idea is that the image when you have the signal and it's in the book or in the exhibition it right away triggers and you hear the story about the making of that photograph so the idea here was that when in making a book you're in the turning of pages you see this icon and you go ahead in time ten years later what happened to the person in the photograph right and that we adapted that here for the exhibitions because it's actually the image that triggers the film clip if you follow so I think time is a very important element of what you see throughout this whole downstairs time is really the sub theme not just place but time time in a place time going on in a place right over time which you feel on the other side, Kurdistan so maybe we should we'll just walk you this way because this is the wall that Karles referred to the violence of the bodies and the necessity, the urgency to document the bodies and then going to Kurdistan ten years later not feeling you need bodies it's the hidden bodies so this is the first wall I strongly felt curatorially it was important to juxtapose the killing in El Salvador and the kind of death that had been hidden the on-fault campaign that was not known in 88 and 89 and not documented most of the Kurds had fled those had survived, fled into Turkey or Iran and I crossed the border from Iran into northern Iraq of the destroyed villages and eventually the mass graves so you see the mass graves and that began this idea that the digging of history would tell about the urgency of this people to be annihilated so what you have here is a four channel projection that really tries to give an audience a sense of how that process happened the way I'm telling you now parts of that suppressed history from dispersed fragments this is coming from the introduction of the book so this is the book and part of what you can get a sense of but this is an archive part of an archive that the Iraqi police had the intelligence police of an execution and as you go back this way this is the documentation I did the archeological drawings of the mass graves the New York Times article that was published and as we go back we go back in time so we keep moving back in time the 70s different parts of Kurdistan the area of Turkey which is really under assault now more than any area do you all know that the Kurds claimed their referendum a week before the Catalonia so you're linked in history going back so these are all made by different people this is a studio photographer in Sulamania in northern Iraq an American photographer published a French photographer so I'm tracing the paths of different image makers over time work from Russia different geographies work from Tajikistan an American ambassador who collects the photographs of the Mahabad which is the only time the Kurds had an autonomous region he collects the photographs in Iran so this idea that we all have the potential to preserve to guard to contribute to a collective history an English colonial administrator of the region this man was sent Major Noel and his was sent from the British to determine the relationship between the Kurds and the Turks in 1919 so it was the idea of how should they how could they live together and of course if you know history you know that today they still can't live together so the policy wasn't really effective again colonial photographs and studio photographs and then here is a video that I did in the street where you see people making those very small little ID photos so what you want is a feeling of the circle of the ID photos that end up in the pockets of the people who are found in the mass graves in the beginning ends with the beginning here for me of seeing a street photographer in that very primitive way making a with a camera and this monitor collect connects to Teymur who is one of the first testigos you can see the bullet the scar of the bullet he survives a village massacre and he ends up testifying against Saddam which is what this monitor shares when we are talking about pictures being held like the plus of the mayo these are some of the photographs that I made kind of registering the importance of photographs and this whole question of memorializing all the story map that you see behind you where is Karles you just told me that you were so here is someone who just told me that he in 1988-89 was in Turkey and made photographs and I am trying to encourage him to come and contribute a little book because really the idea is that the stories go on the stories of encounters with the Kurdish population from whichever area the diaspora living in the various parts of Europe or globally really but we chose to only focus on Europe so each of those are contributed after through workshops that we have been giving we gave a workshop I think there were 15 stories from Barcelona now included either under Barcelona or from the areas they came from in the Middle East so it is this idea that everything is a fragment nothing is complete and we go on hopefully I went home to home I worked a lot with different parts of the community some scholars some just families I went to archives postcards you can see different different sources all over Iran, Iraq, Turkey all over Europe the big archives were in England, France colonial archives, America the colonials kept good records as you can imagine so some are original the studio photographer I just bought a series of studio photographs that he had made I collected the postcards in little shops some are still on loan this is the only ongoing the story map is really ongoing so when we go to France I'll do another workshop in France there'll be another one in San Francisco and people I'm hoping Carlos is going to contribute where is he? he's going to contribute a story you have to check out those little story books because his photographs are part of something that it's not in an archive nobody knows about them so he has to think about what story he wants to tell so the workshops are three or four days people come saying I have nothing to tell I have no story and then they discover there's something very small they do want to say they make the little books they take the pictures they have or they find pictures yeah but it makes it a little bit more site specific to have recent stories these are people who have come to Barcelona very recently as of several weeks in Barcelona actually is the story of a Spanish man who went to a refugee camp on the border of Turkey David and he met his future wife there which he didn't expect and she's now living here it was a beautiful moment that they shared from the two perspectives their story so you never know what you find when you open up the question of stories to share our story it's difficult for these people to have a piece to read well you know I think in some cases I reproduced photographs I didn't take original photographs and in some cases like a community studio archive he's in the business of selling photographs so it's not well it's private but it's understood part of what he does so there he is I was struck by the role of the local photographers keeper of the collective archive which is what we're just talking about yeah okay so yeah yeah yeah