Tanenbaum Lecture with Susan Meiselas

Limited seating, registration required. No entry to event after 7:15pm.

Event Description

Join us for a special lecture by acclaimed documentary photographer and President of the Magnum Foundation, Susan Meiselas, who will explore the history of Magnum Photos’ exhibitions and the evolving role of photographers within them. Drawing from her decades-long career and personal experience organizing and contributing to landmark exhibitions, Meiselas will reflect on how her own work fits into and helps shape Magnum’s broader visual narrative.Presented in conjunction with Magnum’s First, this talk offers a unique behind-the-scenes perspective on one of the world’s most influential photographic cooperatives.

The Tanenbaum Lecture Series is the most established and distinguished lecture series on photography and media arts in Canada. Launched in 1975 within Toronto Metropolitan Univeristy's (formerly Ryerson University) School of Image Arts with a talk by W. Eugene Smith, the series has invited hundreds of leading photographers, video artists, filmmakers, curators and theorists to speak about their work to Toronto's rich audience for image arts. Among the speakers have been Berenice Abbott, Vince Aletti, Dawoud Bey, Stan Brakhage, William Eggleston, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Alfredo Jaar, Sally Mann, Martha Rosler, Jamel Shabazz, Michael Snow, Thomas Struth, and John Szarkowski, among many others. This lecture series was made possible by a generous gift from Howard & Carole Tanenbaum.

Speaker Bio

Susan Meiselas is a documentary photographer based in New York. She is the author of Carnival Strippers (1976), Nicaragua (1981), Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History (1997), Pandora’s Box (2001), Encounters with the Dani (2003), Prince Street Girls (2016), A Room of Their Own (2017), Tar Beach (2020) and Carnival Strippers Revisited (2022). Meiselas is well known for her documentation of human rights issues in Latin America. Her photographs are included in North American and international collections. In 1992 she was made a MacArthur Fellow and received a Guggenheim Fellowship (2015). Most recently, she received the Sony Outstanding Contribution to Photography Award (2025), the first Women in Motion Award from Kering and the Rencontres d’Arles (2019), the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize (2019), and the Erich Salomon Award of the German Society for Photography (2022). Mediations, a survey exhibition of her work from the 1970s to present was initiated by the Jeu de Paume in Paris and traveled to Fundació Antoni Tàpies, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Instituto Moreira Salles in São Paulo, among others. Meiselas has been the President of the Magnum Foundation since 2007, with a mission to expand diversity and creativity in documentary photography.

Image 1: Henri Cartier-Bresson, [Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru announces Mahatma Gandhi's assassination, Delhi, India], 1948, gelatin silver print mounted on fiberboard. © Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson / Magnum Photos

Image 2: Portrait of Susan Meiselas by Meryl Levine

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