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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
With her strongly personal approach, she documents the lives of people on the edges of society -- from the prostitutes of Bombay to the street kids of Seattle to the cowboys of small-town Texas rodeos.
Mar 28, 2000 | In 1965, at the outset of her career, what documentary photographer Mary Ellen Mark wanted to do more than anything was get away: journey to distant countries, travel to unfamiliar places in America, explore and try to understand the lives of as many different kinds of people as she could. That she's put together a world-class body of work on just those initial terms is a testament to her fortitude and self-assurance, and also to her ability to connect, quickly and deeply, with her subjects.
Mark has continued to elevate her goals, to the point where her strikingly diverse photographic series -- of homeless families, runaway children, mentally ill patients, Indian prostitutes -- are all bound together by a generosity of vision. In its social aspect, her work has become synonymous with how important it is to acknowledge the humanity of those people on the edges of society, and often at the edges of their own lives.
Thirty-five years ago, Mark's aims were simple. "I wanted to travel from the beginning," she has said. "As a kid, I used to dream about airplanes, before I ever flew in one. I really knew when I started photographing I wanted it to be a way of knowing different cultures, not just in other countries but in this country, too, and I knew I wanted to be a voyeur."
Her career began on that note. After taking an M.A. at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School of Communications, Mark was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to photograph in Turkey, in 1965, and she spent the next two years traveling there and in other countries, including Greece, Italy, Germany, Spain and England.
Back in the States in 1967, Mark moved to New York and began shooting in Central Park and Times Square and at various news-making events around town. For the next several years, she developed projects on the transvestite culture, pro- and anti-war demonstrations, the women's movement and even burlesque comedians and marriage brokers on 42nd Street. A certain direction in the work was becoming clear: a movement away from mainstream society and toward its more interesting, often troubled fringes. "I'm just interested in people on the edges. I feel an affinity for people who haven't had the best breaks in society," she explained in 1987. "What I want to do more than anything is acknowledge their existence."
At the same time, Mark sought work in a completely different world of money and privilege -- shooting production stills on the sets of Hollywood films. She felt that the work was a combination of portraiture and reportage that suited her style, and it also paid the bills nicely. After working on Arthur Penn's movie "Alice's Restaurant," Mark got an assignment from Look magazine to shoot Federico Fellini filming "Satyricon" in Rome. This led directly to other movie assignments ("Carnal Knowledge," "Catch-22"), and her work began appearing regularly in Look and Life.
But the turning point in her movie-still work came in 1973 when she asked director Milos Forman, with whom she was working on "Taking Off," if she could also work on his upcoming picture, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." The film, shot on location at the Oregon State Mental Hospital, had no budget for a still photographer, so Mark worked for expenses only. "I had always wanted to photograph in a mental hospital," she has said. "I've just always been interested in mental health, mental illness." As the filming proceeded, Mark established a relationship with the hospital's director, who introduced her to the women of the institution's maximum-security Ward 81.
Mark's photojournalism career has been built mostly around magazines. Her photographs and reportorial series have appeared in periodicals worldwide, from Life to Rolling Stone, from Paris Match to the New Yorker. But her first long-term, in-depth series, one that would become a landmark in the development of her empathetic but unsentimental style, didn't appear in a magazine at all.
