“Carnival Strippers does not stoop to whining about what men do to women, anymore than the Nicaraguan work descends to the level of anti-Somoza propaganda. In both cases Meiselas portrays a subtler and more basic contest, in which the universal drive toward decency contends against the lower forms of lust, and the conventional hypocrisies. The work is political but not polemical.”

—American Photographer, March 1981 by Laurence Shames