This is a story about a woman possessed--possessed of great talent, conviction, strength, and a certainty of her role. She is a person obsessed with photography; it is at the center of her life, of who she is. Photography defines her, because through her photography, she seeks to define what it means to be human.

Mary Ellen Mark is a photographer who believes that her strongest essay will be her next one. In a sense, all her work is one journey to that "best" story, which she may never reach or let herself acknowledge. She works with an edge, a haunting dissatisfaction: Could the pictures be better? What is important? Does she have it? Has she gotten to the core? Modest by nature, she uses the word PERHAPS a lot and the phrase "I was lucky" a great deal. But the success of her career is the result of more than luck--rather, it's a knowing rush toward the unknown.

The keynote of Mary Ellen Mark's work has always been people. Literally from the moment she picked up a camera in her first photography course, no other theme has drawn her away from her primary concern. From heroin addicts in the 1960s to circus performers in the 1990s, people remain the center of her engagement with photography. A desire to get close, discover, understand, and reveal the complex and rich variations in individual lives makes all of Mark's photographs very personal. Her images thought of in this way, the boundaries between stories begin to break down, and one sees a continuing story in her work.

Her earlier work includes "Teresa of the Slums," an essay on Mother Teresa's Missions of Charity, and "Streets of the Lost," better known as STREETWISE, the title of a movie made by Mark and her husband, filmmaker Martin Bell. An expanded version of the former was released in book form as PHOTOGRAPHS OF MOTHER TERESA'S MISSIONS OF CHARITY IN CALCUTTA. Other books include WARD 81 and FALKLAND ROAD: PROSTITUTES OF BOMBAY.

Over the years Mark has become increasingly interested in the single image, as opposed to the photographic essay. This explains and, in part, grows out of her admiration for photographers such as W. Eugene Smith, all of whose great stories contain photographs that, when seen independently, sum up the entire story. Ideally, she feels each picture--whether part of an essay or not--ought to stand on its own, to tell the whole story. Taken together, her single pictures of different stories are interrelated and show a core of concern that runs throughout her work.

This book and the exhibition it accompanies bring forward some of Mark's most powerful pictures for consideration. No longer part of an original, encompassing article, each individual image has become part of a broader context. There are drawbacks to this presentation, however. Each original story works well as a unit. For instance, "Children of Desire," a story on teenage pregnancy for THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE, is, in its entirety, a poignant, lyrical look at adolescents falling in and out of love, having babies, and facing a difficult world alone. The selection from this story shown here represents only one aspect among many of a teenager's world--a world created as much by poverty and circumstance as by choice. Although the original narrative of each story is no longer evident, the embedded logic and the consistency among essays still emerges.

For a photographer who considers growth and change a vital part of her life, books and exhibitions that only look back on previous work are a contradiction. This book, therefore, adds to Mark's images from her previous books and magazine articles her newest work, "The Indian Circus." This story affirms and elaborates on earlier themes concerning people on the fringes of society. Once again, India was her vehicle for exploring both the noble and the quixotic in the human spirit.

Finally, this book encompasses a selection of the best of Mark's black-and-white work. She believes herself to be a better photographer when shooting in black and white, and says that this work means more to her than does her work in color. This may be another way of saying that, although she prefers to accept jobs that allow her to explore her primary interests, as a professional photographer she is not always able to dictate the subject or the photographic process.

Sometimes, however, she does choose to work in color, apart from the demands of an assignment. The intensity of the emotion and meaning in her book FALKLAND ROAD would have been diminished without the inclusion of color as pungent as the subject itself. Because self-decoration and display are a primary part of the world of young prostitutes and transvestites in Bombay, color tells the story more emphatically.

Observes Mark: "The difficulty with color is to go beyond the fact that it's color--to have it be not just a colorful picture but really be a picture about something. It's difficult. So often color gets caught up in color, and it becomes merely decorative. Some photographers use [it] brilliantly to make visual statements combining color and content; otherwise it is empty."1

Black-and-white photography can be more abstract and metaphoric than color; it can create synthesis, as opposed to dissonance. For Mark, faces and gestures remain the central focus despite the potential distractions of yellow-and-green curtains or red cars. Black-and-white photography--as practiced by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, Marion Post Wolcott, and W. Eugene Smith--represents the tradition that has inspired Mary Ellen Mark, a tradition that uses the concept of document as its primary aesthetic. Though inspired by this earlier work, she brings a passion to photography that is uniquely her own.

Mark embraced photography suddenly and completely in 1962, during graduate studies at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. She had studied painting and art history for her bachelor's degree from the same university. After graduating, she worked at drafting for a city planner and found she hated it. Deciding to return to school, Mark looked into the Annenberg program. She received a scholarship, and from among concentrations such as creative writing and filmmaking arbitrarily chose photography. That choice determined her career.

"From the very first night, that was it...It was weird. I became obsessed by it. I knew immediately it would be my life's work. I knew I had a chance of being good,"2 she has said. The next day she went out alone on the street to experiment with one of the small cameras each class member had been given to use. Her initial experience of feeling that through photography she now had contact with people, combined with the belief that she could be good at it, changed her life.

Mark had painted and drawn all through her high-school years in Philadelphia in the late fifties and again in college, but she characterizes painting as a lonely, isolating vocation. She adds that she wasn't "passionate or involved enough in the idea of being a painter."3 Photography, however, engaged her emotions, intellect, and will to succeed in a way painting never had. This total immersion remains a hallmark of her working method.

Like many college students, she saw her first efforts appear in the school yearbook and the alumni magazine. The latter, entitled THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE, published in one issue in 1964 two extended stories showing old-timers and school celebrations.

Mark applied for and after graduation in 1965 received a Fulbright scholarship to photograph in Turkey. The government-sponsored educational and cultural program named after Senator J. William Fulbright had been established in 1946 to promote understanding between the United States and other nations. Because of this, knowledge of the language of the country involved in the project was generally required of the applicant. Mark had visited Greece, and wanted to return to that part of the world. She shrewdly guessed that, since Turkish was not widely taught, she would not need to know it in order to be accepted. She was right. Two years of travel followed in Turkey, Greece, Sardinia, Crete, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, England, and Mexico; this was her first extended journey.

The resulting photographs garnered her recognition and gave her a solid portfolio with which to begin her chosen life as a professional photographer when she returned to New York. Some of the work later appeared in her first book, PASSPORT, which was published by Lustrum Press in 1974.

PASSPORT cuts across the cultures of Asia, Europe, and America, beginning with images of Turkish immigrants in Istanbul and ending with a series on the Women's Army Corps training in Alabama. The pictures crowd the pages and vie for the viewer's attention, but even so, the individual images are arresting, conveying a range of emotion. Typical of Mark's early work are her perceptive and provocative photographs of children.

In "Street Child, Trabzon, Turkey", a young girl with a bow in her hair, a wrinkled dress, and dirty, cheap shoes strikes a coquettish, knowing pose. She stands in front of a section of white wall, which thrusts her toward the viewer and camera while isolating her from the dingy surroundings. Her hand on her thigh, she throws one hip out with an aggressive sexuality identified with pinups and B-movie femme fatales.

In another photograph, "English Child, London, England", a girl recedes into black foliage, her hands across her waist and chest in a shy, protective gesture. Her deep-set eyes are obscured by shadow. Similar in age to the Turkish child, she is depicted as having a wholly different attitude toward the world.

Her Fulbright project ended, Mark returned to New York in 1966. No longer a student and without the support of a grant, she had to make it on her own. She began to read through many different newspapers, looking, as she still does, for something that attracted her or, as she says, caught her mind.

She carried a camera with her everywhere, shooting anything that interested her--and many things interested her. She built up series of photographs on Central Park, demonstrations, the early days of the women's movement, an old burlesque comedian, and a marriage broker on Forty-second street.

Though Mark still generates many of her own stories by choice, at the beginning of her career this was the only way to proceed. She was young, new in the field, and unknown, so getting an assignment was practically impossible. By going to an editor with pictures in hand, she eliminated the risk for the magazine. She did not ask publishers to invest money without knowing what the results would be. Instead, if they liked her idea, they could buy rights and assign a writer.

Her first assignment was for JUBILEE, a Catholic magazine that published documentary work in the 1960s. In addition, she investigated two ideas for stories--about body builders and the Psychedelic Burlesque--after discovering items about them in the newspapers. The latter turned out to be a seedy strip show using loud music and projected imagery. Mark took her photographs and then approached the magazines. The first group of pictures appeared in NEW YORK magazine in 1967, and the second in an issue of EVERGREEN in 1968.

In 1967 Mark approached Mort Engelberg at United Artists about a job shooting movie production stills, and she was accepted that year as the special still photographer for ALICE'S RESTAURANT. She looked on shooting stills as a combination of portraiture and reportage having the considerable advantage of much better pay than regular magazine work.

Mark points out that the approach to shooting stills has changed. When she began to work on films "there was a whole different attitude toward photography and relationships with celebrities. You could really take much more personal photographs. Now they all seem to be so controlled by this glitzy formula of the so-called celebrity portrait. You don't get the kind of access now that you did twenty years ago, when I started."4

In the late 1960s, however, it soon became obvious to Mark that the production stills, besides paying the bills, were a brilliant entree into the world of magazines. Some of her earliest big articles were, in fact, made up of photographs from the movies. For example, her first cover for THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE was from THE DAY OF THE LOCUST (1975). Thirteen stills from the film were reproduced in the issue. The next year in London, THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE featured "The Day of the Extra," an article about the same film. This was the first time her work--twenty-three interior photographs in addition to the cover--was carried by THE TIMES.

Her extensive work with film stills over the past twenty years includes dozens of movies, among them APOCALYPSE NOW, THE MISSOURI BREAKS, RAGTIME, SILKWOOD, and TRISTINA. These jobs introduced her work to magazines and, more importantly, led directly to offers of assignments.

Mary Ellen Mark's first big break came, she believes, when in 1969 LOOK editor Pat Carbine accepted her suggestion that she do a story on Federico Fellini making FELLINI SATYRICON. While Mark was in Rome a member of an English television crew told her of a controversial new law in England allowing clinics to dispense heroin to registered addicts. Mark immediately called writer Mary Simons at LOOK. Together, they went to the editors of LOOK, who approved the story. Mark finished the piece on Fellini, shot another in France on filmmaker Francois Truffaut, and then went to London. Published the next year, her photographs for "What the English are Doing About Heroin" (1970) were remarkable--not at all the tentative results of a novice, but a close look at drug users shooting up.

The year 1970 was especially productive for this young photographer, who was just three years into her professional career. She made stills for such films as CARNAL KNOWLEDGE, CATCH-22, and TROPIC OF CANCER. Her first stories appeared in LOOK and LIFE, and she was included in GREAT THEMES, one of the Time-Life series of photographic books. It was just the beginning, and she was not complacent.

A look back finds that Mark's attitude then was no different from what it is today: "You never think that things are going well. I think you always feel that you are only as good as the next thing you do. I've never felt that I'm successful, or that I've made it. I just don't. It's always a battle. I think I've learned over the years, more and more, that you have to be very disciplined about yourself, your work, and what you want...At that time [1970] I was just starting to get some work, and I was excited. I thought it was great, but I didn't feel that by any means I had arrived."5

Because she always has a clear idea of what she wants and of which stories are best for her, Mark is prepared to seize an opportunity when it presents itself. In 1971 she was working on the film TAKING OFF when she heard that the director, Milos Forman, was about to shoot ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST at a mental institution in Oregon. She liked Forman and wanted to work on this film. She remembers: "I heard he was making CUCKOO'S NEST, and they didn't have any budget to afford a special still photographer at that time (little did they know it was going to be a huge success), so I convinced the producer to let me work just for expenses...I had always wanted to photograph in a mental hospital. I've just always been interested in mental health, mental illness...I thought this was a chance for me to meet people and for me to get access into the hospital. And, in fact, it was."6

Once in Oregon, in addition to photographing the actors, she met the director of the hospital, who took her on a tour of the facility, which included a woman's maximum security unit. Ward 81 was kept locked because the inmates were considered dangerous to themselves and to others. On seeing the women in this closed environment, Mark resolved to return with her camera.

She kept in contact with the director during the next year, calling him several times to elaborate on her proposal to photograph in the hospital. She urged him to let her return with a writer and live in the security ward. Eventually he consented. Beginning in February 1976 she and Karen Folger Jacobs spent thirty-six days in Ward 81 interviewing and photographing the women.

Recognizing an opportunity to come in contact with and respond to mental illness, Mark had reacted decisively: she traveled to Oregon and worked on Forman's movie essentially for free. The existence of Ward 81 proved the risk had been worthwhile. Having made the decision and seen the patients, Mark made the project happen through persistent diplomacy and force of will.

Great photographers know what their subjects are. In other words, they know what moves them deeply, what continues to concern them. For some, it is a certain kind of landscape or a formal design, for others, a point of view rather than a specific topic. Some need to understand the politics of a given situation; some will use their images to comment explicitly on that situation. For all, photography is an ongoing conversation with the world and with themselves.

For Mark, both the questions she has about the world and the statements she needs to make have to do with people. Her great gift is that she has understood this from the beginning of her work with the medium. Once published, the photographs speak to the context of particular issues, such as addiction, poverty, and mental health. The best illuminate their topic; many provoke verbal, written, or photographic responses. And the conversation goes on.

At some point this instinct for what is important converts to commitment. Just as a writer is said to find her "voice," a photographer recognizes her particular way of seeing: form and content merge. For Mary Ellen Mark this happened early in her career.

Mark says that when photographing she wants to reach and touch "something that I feel is at the core of people. [Because the mentally ill are very open] we are able to see something in them and in ourselves. I think they tell us about inhibitions and all those things that we hide so much."7

About WARD 81, she has further observed: "The women had very strong personalities. Some of them were funny, some romantic, some social. You could label them just the way you might label your friends--this is the comedian...this is the social one...The difference was that the feelings were so much more exaggerated. There's no bullshit--the emotions are pure."8

The line between the life of a mental patient and that of a "normal" person is very thin, Mark feels. She wanted to reveal the closeness by showing recognizable women, their emotions, and the relationships among them. No polite conventions were recognized or observed on Ward 81, and the women displayed the full force of their personalities. By observing the extremes, Mark came to recognize more fully the masks that society employs: "I wanted to capture the different aspects and ranges of these personalities. I didn't want to get their case histories. I didn't want to be forced to put people in pigeonholes, saying 'Aha! This one is a schizophrenic'...It was a project of my own, and I just wanted to do photographs that I believed in without having any rhyme or reason or theory, or having to spell out a sort of storytelling. I wanted to show their personalities--that was the thing that drew me to them."9

In her first sustained personal project, then, Mark did not want to produce the traditional magazine story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. She was not interested in fulfilling any of the didactic requirements--the telling of who, what, where, why, or how--of reportage. Instead, her desire was to get close to these women, to understand them as well as she could, and to give visual expression to the connection she felt. She wanted to make strong pictures displaying clear emotions, pictures that did not need lengthy explanatory captions.

Robert Hughes, the art critic at TIME magazine, was moved to write that WARD 81 was "a lamentation: one of the most delicately shaded studies of vulnerability ever set on film."10

WARD 81 is central to Mark's work. In it surface all the themes seen in her later photographs. The women were not celebrities; they were "unfamous," to use Mark's phrase. They let their stories be told rather than affecting a pose. They were not newsworthy; they did nothing extraordinary; they persevered. They had had a bad break; for whatever reason, they were ill. And they were not free. In other situations poverty may restrict a person's choices; here, the women were literally confined.

Above all, Mark uses metaphor. In WARD 81, as in all of her work, she looked for the universal in the particular, endeavoring to understand something basic about being human in the lives of those on the fringes of society.

Concerning the recurring ideas in her work, Mark says: "I think that we are who we are. There are various themes about our lives that are part of our work, and they repeat themselves. I don't think you do a project and the feelings are finished. They resurface in another form; you reexamine them."11 It is interesting to note that Mark places the "themes" in the context of her LIFE; her work makes these life themes visible. In many cases, then, she is not merely fulfilling an assignment for a magazine but exploring a subject embedded in her life.

Two personal experiences illuminate her fascination with mental illness. Her third-grade class made several trips: to a museum, to a dairy farm, and, finally, to a local mental hospital. This first exposure made a sudden and deep impression on her. The impact of the other encounter lingered much longer: Mark's father was often ill when she was growing up, and he suffered several nervous breakdowns, for which he was hospitalized.

Living in Ward 81 confirmed Mark's belief that she wanted exclusively to photograph people and their environments. The experience was valuable in that she "discovered what access is, how far you can go, when you can go, when you can't go--all those sorts of signals. I learned a lot from that because I stayed for a long time and it changed the way I work. It made me realize that I like to work where I stay in one place for a long time...the longer I stay, the closer I can get."12

In order to continue working on long-term projects and still make a living, Mark needed to find a way to market her work and skills while she was busy photographing. So in 1977 Mark became a member of Magnum Photos, Inc. She had looked forward to being in this agency, which had been founded, in part, by Henri Cartier-Bresson, whose photographs she much admired. Magnum was not the first agency with which she was associated. From 1968 until 1971 she had been with Woodfin Camp, and from 1971 until 1976, with Lee Gross, who worked primarily in the movies.
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