Look inside
In 1970, while a student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Susan Meiselas was living in a boarding house at 44 Irving Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts. What began as a class project evolved into a deeply empathetic portrait of community domestic life. Meiselas photographed her neighbors in the building – many of them strangers – inside their rooms, initiating a collaborative exchange by sharing contact sheets and inviting written responses. These reflections appear alongside the photographs, offering insight into how her subjects saw themselves.
Boarding houses like 44 Irving Street were transitional spaces, yet Meiselas found individuality and self-expression in each room. Her portraits – full of personal detail and visual texture – reveal a rich inner life often hidden in shared housing. The handwritten letters act as a kind of written punctum, a counterpoint to the image that pierces the surface with honesty and introspection.
This early body of work helped shape Meiselas’s enduring approach to photography as a form of connection and dialogue. 'It wasn’t about the formalism of photography,' she notes. 'It was about the narrative and the connectivity.'
44 Irving Street, 1970–1971 marks the first time this complete series has been published in book form. The book includes two tip-ins: a photograph and a contact sheet from the original project.
In 1970, while a student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Susan Meiselas was living in a boarding house at 44 Irving Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts. What began as a class project evolved into a deeply empathetic portrait of community domestic life. Meiselas photographed her neighbors in the building – many of them strangers – inside their rooms, initiating a collaborative exchange by sharing contact sheets and inviting written responses. These reflections appear alongside the photographs, offering insight into how her subjects saw themselves.
Boarding houses like 44 Irving Street were transitional spaces, yet Meiselas found individuality and self-expression in each room. Her portraits – full of personal detail and visual texture – reveal a rich inner life often hidden in shared housing. The handwritten letters act as a kind of written punctum, a counterpoint to the image that pierces the surface with honesty and introspection.
This early body of work helped shape Meiselas’s enduring approach to photography as a form of connection and dialogue. 'It wasn’t about the formalism of photography,' she notes. 'It was about the narrative and the connectivity.'
44 Irving Street, 1970–1971 marks the first time this complete series has been published in book form. The book includes two tip-ins: a photograph and a contact sheet from the original project.