During the Nicaraguan Revolution (1978–79), photographer Susan Meiselas (b. 1948 in Baltimore, MD; lives in New York, NY) documented the Sandinista Liberation Front (FSLN) as they fought to replace 43 years of the Somoza family’s dictatorship. Among the photographs she captured were Sandinista fighters donning masks from indigenous communities, as a way of hiding their identities from the National Guard. Such masks continue to be used today in current struggles against the government of Daniel Ortega. For her installation The Life of an Image: The Mask (2022), Meiselas brings together two of the original photographs, a series of tear sheets that show how their images circulated globally, and two excerpts from her 1991 film Pictures From a Revolution, that capture interviews she conducted with two of the figures she had photographed ten years later.
