I have only just walked out of the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, and I felt the urge to write right away about the striking exhibition I have just seen: “Nicaragua, History, Memory” by the American photographer Susan Meiselas. It is not just an exhibition of war photographs: it is a meditation on what images become once they slip out of our hands. It is also the work of an immense photographer.
From the very first room, I am drawn in by the tension of these images, taken between June 1978 and July 1979, as the people of Nicaragua rose up against the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza.
Entering the revolution
Susan Meiselas is thirty years old. She has just joined Magnum. She sets off almost alone, without an assignment, because she senses that something is happening there. And what she brings back has a force that, nearly half a century later, has lost none of its burn.
Every photograph is powerful. Every photograph is intense, charged with emotion and with stories. We see the muchachos of Matagalpa, crouched behind a barricade, awaiting the National Guard’s counterattack. We see the young insurgents of Monimbó, their faces hidden behind traditional masks, as if the revolt had borrowed the costumes of popular festivals. We see the naked violence of the regime, the abandoned bodies, the gutted houses. And everywhere, that colour, warm, saturated, almost feverish, which denies the drama the comfortable distance of black and white.
The gaze of a photographer, not a voyeur
Having photographed conflict zones myself, from Ukraine to Lebanon, Nagorno-Karabakh, Belfast, I know the temptation of the spectacular. War offers easy images, and that is precisely why it is so hard to photograph honestly.
What moves me so deeply about Meiselas is that she never gives in to that ease. She is at the heart of the action, as close as can be, and yet you never sense the predator. You sense presence, commitment, empathy. Her framing has an impressive dramatic precision; there is theatre in her compositions, in the noblest sense of the word.
A staging of reality that invents nothing but reveals everything. The gestures, the glances, the silhouettes cut out against the light tell a collective tragedy at human scale.
It is dramatic. It is moving. And it is profoundly true.
The Molotov Man
At the centre of the exhibition stands this image. Estelí, 16 July 1979, three days before Somoza’s fall. A Sandinista fighter, arm drawn back, is about to throw an incendiary bottle made from a Pepsi can. He came to be known as “Molotov Man”.
I knew it, of course. Everyone knows it. But the exhibition does something remarkable: it does not simply hang it on the wall like an icon. It tells its life story. For this photograph became a symbol, reproduced on posters, walls, stamps, matchboxes, taken up by the Sandinista government and then by other causes, diverted, reinterpreted, sometimes betrayed.
That is the whole point of curator Clément Chéroux, director of the Fondation: to show that images live their own lives, independently of the person who created them. And it was in Nicaragua that Susan Meiselas came to understand this.
Returning, finding, giving back
This is undoubtedly the part that touched me most. Meiselas did not take her images only to leave with them. She came back. Years later, she returned to Nicaragua, photographs in hand, to find the people she had photographed, to hear what had become of them, what the revolution had done to them, and what her images had done to them.
Later still, she reinstalled her photographs in large format at the very places where they had been taken, giving them back to those to whom they perhaps belong more than to her.
Through more than a hundred works, documents and film excerpts, the exhibition unfolds this dialogue between history and memory, between the moment the picture is taken and the decades that follow. For a photographer, it is a lesson in ethics. For any visitor, it is a lesson in humanity.
A great photographer
I came back out onto rue des Archives with one conviction: Susan Meiselas is a truly great photographer. Not only because she was in the right place at the right time, but because she knew what she owed to the people she photographed, and she has never stopped repaying that debt.
In 2025, the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson awarded her its Lifetime Achievement Award. This exhibition, presented as part of the Bicentenary of Photography, is its finest justification.
Go. Take your time. Let the images look at you as much as you look at them.
Grégory Herpe
Practical information
Susan Meiselas – Nicaragua, History, Memory Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, 79 rue des Archives, 75003 Paris 21 October 2026 – 7 March 2027 – Curator: Clément Chéroux
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