Domestic Violence

In 1992, Meiselas was asked to contribute to an awareness campaign to give greater prominence to growing domestic violence in San Francisco. This led her to create Archives of Abuse, collages of police reports and photographs of crime scenes, exhibited in the city’s public spaces as bus shelter posters. “My instinct”, said Meiselas, “was to start with the evidence – sometimes found in hotel rooms, sometimes in homes. . . . I recognised the power of absence within these archives of abuse. I imagined the places where things had happened, and discovered the emptiness of the aftermath image. A scar or wound is evidence, but the place itself is only really known to the person on whom the violence was inflicted. It exists in memory.”

In 2015, Meiselas worked with women survivors of domestic abuse in a post-industrial region of the UK. A Room of Their Own, Meiselas’s latest work, is a multi-layered visual story in which her photographs are combined with testimonies and collages made by the participants in a collaborative process between the women, local artists, Meiselas and Multistory, a non-profit local arts organisation. “In my photographs, each room, like each life, is unique. The image of a space is a record and also a kind of mirror. The woman is absent, yet present. . . . These photographs may serve as a memory of each landscape, at a particular point in time.”