Examining Susan Meiselas’ “Cuesta del Plomo”
“Cuesta del Plomo, a well-known site of many assassinations carried out by the National Guard, where people searched daily for missing persons, Managua”, Nicaragua, from the series Nicaragua, 1981. Color Photograph.
In 1961, a coalition of students, laborers, small businesses, churches, and organizations titled the FSLN (The Sandinista National Liberation Front) was created and had generated a strong enough uproar against longtime dictator Anastasio Somoza. After a decade’s worth of guerilla tactics and protests, the FSLN solidified itself in the media and public’s eye as a reliable force against the Somoza Regime. The Somoza Regime, formed mainly by the Nicaraguan National Guard, declared a siege state and proceeded to use torture, intimidation, massacres, and press censorship to fight the FSLN attacks. By the time the Somoza fled the country in 1979, Nicaragua was left with more than 130,000 casualties, 600,000 homeless, and a broken economy. The government’s collapse left the country suffering, and the FSLN lead the recovery from the damage years of the revolutionary war had left.
Susan Meiselas is an American documentary photographer best known for her 1970s photographs of American carnival strippers and a socially conflicted Nicaragua. She’s been part of Magnum Photos ever since 1976 and has continued to be a freelance photographer with a keen interest in the sociopolitical conditions of countries worldwide. Meiselas landed in Nicaragua during the insurrection’s evolution and spent six weeks accompanied by her Leica M4 loaded with Kodachrome 64 color film and a Leica M2 loaded with Kodak Tri-X 400 black and white film. In several publications, she has noted that publishing the color photographs came from the desire to maintain the crudeness and reality of the moment, which she thought would only be adequately revealed through color. Rightly so, the color film provided exceptional realism and vivid contrast to the photographs.
The photograph titled “Cuesta del Plomo” was taken in Managua, Nicaragua, in 1979. Meiselas provided a sub-title to it that provides context to the photograph that reads, “A well-known site of many assassinations carried out by the National Guard, where people searched daily for missing persons.”[1] In this piece, the camera is above eye level, slightly tilted to the ground, pointing to a beautiful Nicaraguan landscape on a sunny day. The earth tones, in contrast to the bright blue sky, enhance the aesthetics of the photograph. The image's sharpness makes it easy for the viewer to dwell on the small details, such as the electricity posts along the path and the small wooden homes near the lake. The clouds’ rich textures lead the viewer into the mountains in the distance that make their way towards the middle ground. The mountains’ curves are simultaneous to the path that takes hold of the center of the image. The combination of mountains, wild trees, and bushes sees nature in all its ever-growing glory. Closest to the spectator, we see our subject: a dismembered body, with its corresponding arms and bones scattered through the ground. The face and torso are gone, and the only identifiable features are the spine column, pelvis, and pant-covered legs. The dismembered arm and hand are bloated and bloody, almost disappearing into the dirt beneath.
Keagan Sparks, in an article for Artforum International, writes: “Meiselas’s series balances fidelity to sociopolitical context with attention to the volatility of visual signs—a quality more commonly associated with postmodernist photography than with the evidentiary claims of the documentary. Her archive of the Nicaraguan revolution often flouts the separation between reality and representation, proving that history happens in and through the world of images.”[2] In a statement, Brett Rogers, the director of the Photographers’ Gallery in London, said, “Susan’s consistent approach to the medium and her personal investment in the stories, histories, and communities she documents has carved out a new and important form of socially engaged photography. It proposes a sustainable and ongoing relationship with the people and their contexts and feels especially relevant and resonant today.”
The strong contrast of life and death is the most compelling about the photograph, nature consuming what once was a living, breathing human being. If we were to push meaning further, we could say that it’s a reminder that we all return to the ground. In context, this photograph is a visual manifestation of the Nicaraguan people’s indignation and outrage. They were stripped of their humanity and torn to shreds by the very state-trained officials that are supposed to protect them. Although not relevant to the study of the photograph itself, I find fascinating the story of how Meiselas reached this unique location, hidden in the hills. In “Exposure 21,” no.1 (1988), she recounts the event by explaining, “I used to get in the car as early in the morning as I could and drive, looking for things that seemed unusual. One day I was driving on the outskirts of Managua when I smelled something. It was a very steep hill, and as I got closer to the top, the odor overwhelmed me. I looked out and saw a body and stopped to photograph it. I don't know how long it had been there, but long enough for the vultures to have eaten half of it. I shot two frames, I think, one in color and one in black and white, then got out. The images I made of the body were powerful partly because of the contrast with the landscape's beauty. [It’s hard for] the American public [to] relate their reality to this image. They could not account for what they saw.”[3] These photographs' particularity is the extraordinary narrative they create, informing us of a nation on the brink of collapse and a testament to its people’s pain.
Bibliography:
https://www.icp.org/browse/archive/constituents/susan-meiselas?all/all/all/all/0
https://www.magnumphotos.com/photographer/susan-meiselas/
https://www.magnumphotos.com/newsroom/susan-meiselas-nicaragua/
https://www.lensculture.com/articles/susan-meiselas-style-can-t-sustain-you-notes-from-the-field
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Nicaragua_(1979%E2%80%931990)
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Sandinista
[1] San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Susan Meiselas, https://www.sfmoma.org/artwork/2006.68/
[2] Artforum Magazine, Reviews: Susan Meiselas, https://www.artforum.com/print/reviews/202005/susan-meiselas-82856
[3] Susan Meiselas, Official Website, http://www.susanmeiselas.com/latin-america/1978-1979/#id=somoza_regime