Mary Ellen Mark

photographer

For three decades, Mary Ellen Mark has photographed members of subcultures around the world, including heroin addicts in England, runaway teenagers on the streets of Seattle, women in a locked psychiatric ward at Oregon State Hospital, circus performers in India, prostitutes in Bombay, and children with cancer in a camp in California.
Her constant theme is people in a social context, and she generally aims for an empathetic but unsentimental expression of humanistic values. One of the world’s most respected documentary photographers, Mark moves seamlessly between journalistic and artistic contexts: she has completed many editorial assignments for magazines, photographed advertising campaigns and published books about her personal projects.
Her work has been featured in numerous gallery and museum exhibitions worldwide, and her photographs are included in major museum and private collections.
Born in Philadelphia in 1940 to a middle-class family, Mark received her undergraduate training in fine arts, earning a BFA in art history and painting from the University of Pennsylvania in 1962. She embraced photography while continuing her studies at the University of Pennsylvania as a graduate student at the Annenberg School for Communication, earning an MA in photojournalism in 1964.
After graduating, she went to Turkey to photograph on a Fulbright scholarship and then travelled throughout Europe. In 1966, she moved to New York City and began working as a freelance photojournalist. In 1968 she travelled to India for the first time, a country that has inspired some of her most important work. Throughout her career, she has photographed throughout the United States and in many other parts of the world, including England, Spain, India, Vietnam and Mexico. Mark’s work has appeared in magazines such as Life, Time, Paris-Match, Ms., New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Vogue and The New Yorker, as well as virtually all the leading photography magazines and journals. She has published several books of her photographs and her work has appeared in many anthologies and exhibition catalogues.
Early on, Mark also found success as a photographer for the film industry, a lucrative career direction that helped subsidise her social documentary projects. She shot production stills for dozens of films, including Alice’s Restaurant, The Day of the Locust, Apocalypse Now, Ragtime, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Silkwood. The film stills brought her attention and commissions from magazines, these included a commission from Look in 1969 to produce a photo essay on Federico Fellini, director of the film Satyricon, which Mark regards as her breakthrough into photojournalism.
Always curious about the vagaries of human experience, Mark specialised in social documentation and portraiture, working primarily in black and white.

While some of her editorial work has involved portraits of celebrities, including film stars and directors, writers, artists and musicians, more often Mark has photographed what she calls the ‘unfamous’, people outside the mainstream whose lives are not conventionally newsworthy. She is particularly drawn to outcasts whose lives take place in a difficult situation that isolates them, such as poverty, illness or addiction; and to people who live in social groups that function like a surrogate family, such as performers in a travelling circus or the inhabitants of a brothel. The diversity of her subjects reflects both the commissions she is offered and her personal interest in certain subjects; she manages to fund personal projects through a variety of means, including grants, financial support from non-profit organisations and selling her ideas to magazines and other commercial outlets.
Mark’s preferred method is to approach a project by immersing herself in the world of her subjects over an extended period of time, developing a relationship with them and learning to see the nuances of their environment. To give a few examples: Mark and the writer Karen Folger Jacobs lived for 36 days in a maximum security women’s unit of a mental institution in Oregon, resulting in the book Ward 81 (1979); Mark spent several months on two separate trips to India in 1980 and 1981 photographing Mother Teresa and her Missions of Charity in Calcutta for a Life magazine assignment and subsequent book; and she travelled with 16 different circuses on two three-month trips to India to produce the book Indian Circus (1993). Sometimes Mark keeps in touch with people long after a project has finished.
For example, she has returned to Seattle repeatedly to photograph Erin Blackwell, or ‘‘Tiny,’’ who was 14 when Mark first photographed her in 1983 for a photo-essay for Life, including the often reproduced image, ‘‘Tiny in Her Halloween Costume”, Seattle, Washington, USA. The latter assignment led to the Academy Award nominated film Streetwise (1985), directed and photographed by Mark’s husband, the filmmaker Martin Bell, and to Mark’s 1988 book of the same title.
In her photo essays, Mark is more interested in revealing individual personalities within their sociological context than in telling a conventional narrative with a beginning, middle and end. Her influences include the work of photojournalists Margaret Bourke-White, Dorothea Lange and W. Eugene Smith. Mark is interested in exploring the emotional and psychological tenor of small societies and makes no pretence to objectivity.
Of Ward 81, Mark says, ”I just wanted to make photographs that I believed in, without any rhyme or reason or theory, or any kind of narrative. I wanted to show their personalities – that was what attracted me to them’’. Speaking more generally about her intentions for her work, Mark said: ”I think every photographer has a point of view and a way of looking at the world […] that has to do with your subject matter and how you want to present it. What’s interesting is letting people tell you about themselves in the picture.”
Mark wants each of her images, even those that are part of a photo essay, to be able to stand alone as a single image, to summarise and give an insight into the personality and life of a particular subject. A hallmark of Mark’s style is that her subjects are aware of the camera and make eye contact, projecting themselves into the lens. This intimacy reflects Mark’s ability to engage with her subjects on a personal level; the approach also involves the viewer, as the subjects appear to be looking directly at them. Mark prefers black and white to colour, but does occasionally shoot in colour, including the images for her book Falkland Road: Prostitutes of Bombay (1981), which show Bombay prostitutes in the colourfully patterned interiors of brothels. Although Mark demands high technical quality in her prints, she does not do her own darkroom work. She mostly uses small, hand-held 35mm cameras and likes to work close to her subjects with short lenses. She has also used medium format and 4×5 inch view cameras. She used the large 20×24 inch Polaroid camera for her study of twins, shot over several years at the annual Twins Days Festival in Twinsburg, Ohio, and published in the book Twins (2003).