NICARAGUA: Diptychs of Insurrection

Berkeley student and Nicaraguan-American Lesdi Goussen on the current state of the country and the Meiselas photos.

Susan Meiselas’s images documenting the overthrow of the Somoza regime in 1978-1979 have become ubiquitous for visualizing the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua. A decade after these photographs were first published and well into the precarious leadership of the Sandinista government, Meiselas returned to the country in 1991 to follow up with the subjects pictured in her work. Crossing temporal coordinates, Meiselas’s photographs emerge as diptychs of insurrection, capturing the ways in which people and places transgress and transform over time.