| Essay Biographical Timeline Credits Essay - by Charles Hagen A kind of privileged insight into the lives of others, particularly those separated from us by barriers of class or nationality, has always been documentary photography's greatest promise. But of the thousands of photographers who have set out to record other people in the century and a half since the medium was invented, surprisingly few have managed to overcome their practical and emotional separation from their subjects. Mary Ellen Mark achieves this elusive goal in her photographs by simply presenting her subjects with respect and compassion. For over thirty years she has excelled at the traditional task of the documentary photographer, recording the lives of people on the margins of society in dramatic and visually compelling images. What sets her pictures apart, though, is their intimacy, the sense that in looking at them we are being offered unfiltered glimpses into the lives and spirits of the people they record, whether prostitutes in Bombay, homeless teenagers in Seattle or circus performers in India. Mark's photographs go beyond being records of newsworthy events and people. She is usually classed as a photojournalist or a documentary photographer, but neither term fully describes the kinds of pictures she makes. Like other news photographs, her images are rooted in reality, and many of them record the human faces behind social issues that might otherwise be reduced to dry statistics. Their real impact, however, comes most often not from their journalistic value, but from the way they present dramatic tableaux that resonate with emotional and psychological force. Her best pictures have an almost dreamlike quality, offering rich symbolic narratives about human strengths and frailties. The importance of this symbolic dimension to Mark's photographs contradicts common assumptions about both documentary photography and photography in general. A photograph is a translation of reality into a picture - a two-dimensional construct that not only records the physical appearance of things and people, but also functions through the language of form, shape, and space. Much of a photographer's skill rests on the ability to negotiate these different ways of producing meaning. This translation is at the heart of debates about documentary photography, with some critics viewing it as a way of recording a reality that is self-evident and unmediated, and others arguing that reality itself is a social construct, and any photograph of it inherently subjective. Instead of talking about photographs as documents, this line of reasoning suggests, it is better to think of photographs as arguments. Photographers themselves have long recognized the relationship of suggestion and statement that exists between their pictures and the real world - and have tried to exploit the hints of meaning offered by their medium. Not content with simple accuracy, ambitious photographers have sought truth. But definitions of truth are notoriously subjective, and reflect the assumptions and values of whoever is doing the defining. Despite their suggestions of objectivity, documentary photographs have always presented the world as seen from a certain point of view, in a certain light. In extreme cases, ostensibly documentary projects can become pure propaganda: Leni Riefenstahl's great films Triumph of the Will and Olympia, made in the 1930s for Adolf Hitler, are prime examples. In this debate, Mark's photographs - like those of most significant documentary photographers - fall somewhere in the middle. But what makes her work distinctive is her ability to blend the two sides of documentary in an interesting way - to take pictures that remain rooted in reality, but deal in the larger human meanings that can only be approached through fiction. Mark came to photography almost by chance. As an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania she studied painting and art history, receiving her degree in 1962. After graduation she was given a scholarship to attend the Annenberg School for Communication at the university; there, for no particular reason, she chose to concentrate on photography. She began to go out into the neighbourhoods of the city with one of the simple cameras that were given to all students taking photography courses, and soon her photo-essays were appearing in the student newspaper. After receiving her Master's degree from the Annenberg School in 1964, Mark was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to photograph in Turkey. Over the next two years, she travelled throughout Turkey and the rest of Europe, taking pictures wherever she went. Themes and qualities that continue in Mark's work today were already present in those early pictures. The wry humour of an image like The Man Who Won the Moustache Contest (page 21) - taken while Mark was wandering through the streets of Istanbul looking for scenes to photograph - is typical of much of her later work, as are the dramatic lighting and relaxed elegance of the man's pose. Equally, a photograph of a girl on a street in Trabzon, Turkey (page 17), exemplifies a key theme in Mark's work: children trying to act like adults. The girl's cotton dress, the floppy bow in her hair, her white shoes and ankle-length socks all announce her as a child, but her bold stare and seductive pose offer a cartoon of adult sexuality. The conflict between the competing signals given out by the image is jarring; there is something poignant and rather pathetic about the girl's attempt to adopt a role for which she is unready. These pictures from the beginning of Mark's career also demonstrate her ability to put her subjects at ease, to earn their trust and get them not only to accept being photographed, but also to collaborate implicitly in the process. 'You have to learn a certain diplomacy when you're doing documentary,' Mark said in a recent interview. 'You have to be able to understand very quickly the framework of every situation you find yourself in, and be able to take command, in order to get the pictures you want.' When Mark returned to New York she embarked on what was then a typical career as a photojournalist. She carried a camera with her everywhere, photographing projects of her own choosing as well as assignments from editors. Her photo-essays soon began to appear in magazines like New York and Evergreen, and later in Life and the New York Times Magazine. In 1967 Mark took another direction in her photography when she was hired to shoot production stills for the film Alice's Restaurant. Over the ensuing years she worked on a long list of films, from Apocalypse Now and Tristana to Ragtime and Carnal Knowledge. This work proved to be a lucrative way to underwrite her lower-paying magazine projects. It also provided her with entree into a world of celebrity and glamour that in some cases helped on her documentary work: her first cover shot for the New York Times Magazine, for example, was from The Day of the Locust (1975), and the following year the British Sunday Times magazine also featured a portfolio of her pictures from the film. Directly or indirectly, Mark's film work has produced memorable images. Her shot of Federico Fellini directing Fellini Satyricon, for example, was taken in 1969 for Look magazine. In Mark's photograph, Fellini, caught in the glare of bright lights, seems about to break into a dance. This graceful gesture recalls the qualities of his films themselves. In recent years, though, Mark has largely given up this kind of work, except when friends in the film industry - the director Tim Burton, for example - ask her to take on a job. 'It was a different time,' Mark said of her early work in film. 'As a photographer I had much more freedom then. Now movies are so expensive that everyone's afraid to take any time off to let you do something. Back then I could just wander around freely and take documentary pictures.' It is interesting to note how many of Mark's subsequent projects have dealt with people living in isolated and temporary communities that at least in their structure recall film sets. A mental ward, gypsy encampments, circuses, even a homeless family in California - all subjects Mark has photographed at length - make up small societies that not only are fascinating sociologically but also exert a romantic appeal, like bands of exiles; they also suggest substitute, extended families. On one occasion this work led her directly to a major documentary project. In 1971 she volunteered to be the still photographer on Milos Forman's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest; during the production she toured a women's maximum security ward in the Oregon mental hospital where it was being filmed. The experience so moved her that five years later she returned and spent over a month photographing and interviewing the women confined on the ward. The resulting images were published in American Photographer magazine and, later, as the book Ward 81 (1979). In this as in many other projects Mark photographed women in distress. But however difficult the circumstances her subjects face, Mark always stresses their simple humanity, presenting them as individuals. She sees herself as a kind of photographic hybrid: a portrait photographer who also makes documentary images. The combination is a fruitful one. Mark's skills as a portraitist have served her well in commercial work, where she is called upon to photograph celebrities or newsmakers in ways that create fresh images in the minds of her audience. But her documentations of the lives of outsiders also draw their strength from her ability to capture her subjects' personalities. Presented in visually commanding environmental portraits, they become characters we can admire and identify with. By the mid 1970s, Mark had already established herself as an outstanding photojournalist. A series of major assignments for magazines cemented her reputation. She gained increasing recognition from her peers as well: in 1977 she was elected to Magnum, the cooperative picture agency founded thirty years before by a group of photographers that included Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa and others, and that had long been a home for photojournalists with strong personal visions. In 1968 Mark made her first trip to India, a country she has returned to repeatedly over the years, and the site of several of her most important projects. 'I first went to India by chance,' she says, 'and I loved it.' On each of her early trips she would visit Bombay's Falkland Road, a street lined with brothels, and try to photograph there. But it wasn't until 1978, when she was given an assignment from Geo magazine, that she was able to devote the time needed to depict life on the street. In the end she spent three months working on the project. Gaining access to the brothels proved difficult. At first Mark photographed in the street outside, but people were suspicious of her, and she soon became a target: people threw rubbish at her, and once her wallet was stolen. But she persisted, returning to the street day after day. 'Finally one madam invited me in for tea,' she says. 'We became friends, and soon other madams let me in.' Like many other documentary photographers, Mark prefers to work in black and white. For the Falkland Road project, however, her editors insisted that she photograph in colour. The assignment was a technical challenge: the women's rooms were small and dim, making lighting difficult but necessary. Mark worked with a simple flash unit, bouncing its light off walls and ceilings to raise the illumination in the tight spaces. But the intense colours of the rooms and the women's saris give Mark's pictures from Falkland Road an electric vividness, with the bright colours underscoring the emotional qualities of the scenes. India was the setting for another important project that Mark undertook in 1980, when Life magazine assigned her to photograph Mother Teresa, the nun who had set up a network of hospitals and care centres for the poor of Calcutta and the surrounding region. Mark spent nearly a month photographing her and her Missions of Charity, especially the Nirmal Hriday, or Home for the Dying. Mother Teresa had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize the year before, and Mark found her to be adept at shaping her own public image. 'She was extremely aware of the camera,' Mark remembers. 'She knew exactly what a picture does, and the image she wanted to present. I never felt you could steal a picture from her.' 'Once she asked me to learn humility by sitting under the steps and eating lunch,' Mark continues. 'What was I going to say? I did it!' Despite some restrictions on her picture-taking, Mark was given relative freedom to photograph the scenes she found in the missions. When Mother Teresa became internationally famous shortly thereafter, Mark adds, 'access to her became much more difficult. The Indian government became afraid that stories about her would emphasize the country's poverty too much.' Today, the degree of access that Mark had is no longer available, as she acknowledges: 'People today are aware of the power of media, and are frightened by it.' Mark's essay on Mother Teresa ran in Life magazine in July 1980. But Mark felt she hadn't finished her project and returned to Calcutta early in 1981; the photographs from both trips were later published as a book. This demonstrates another source of Mark's success as a picturemaker: she doesn't just grab images and then move on; instead she will work for weeks or months on a project, returning day after day to a place, even when her subjects are initially reluctant to be photographed. As often as not, such persistence pays off with access and pictures. Frequently, Mark will stay in touch with her subjects long after an assignment is over. 'I believe in keeping up contacts,' she says. Nowhere was this more clearly demonstrated than in a story she first did for Life in 1983, about teenage runaways. Seattle was chosen for the story because it seemed typical - 'it wasn't New York or Los Angeles', Mark remembers. Together with writer Cheryl McCall, Mark flew to Seattle. Social welfare agencies were of little help in her attempts to get in touch with the runaways, so Mark simply went downtown and began hanging out on a street corner where homeless teens congregated. 'There was a group of kids who were there all the time, on one block - First and Pike Streets,' she recalls. 'They weren't all friends, but all of them knew each other.' Many documentary photographers believe in getting to know their subjects before they start taking pictures. Mark, though, prefers to begin photographing as soon as she arrives on the scene. 'I start shooting right away - always,' she says. 'If you don't, you're misrepresenting your role in the situation.' She followed this tactic with the teens, and soon met Erin 'Tiny' Blackwell, a fourteen-year-old runaway who became the centre of Mark's story. 'A cab pulled up and a bunch of kids got out,' she recalls. 'They all looked like baby prostitutes.' When Blackwell first saw Mark she ran away, thinking that the photographer was with the police. One of her most famous pictures shows Blackwell on Halloween, dressed as a French prostitute, in a black cocktail dress with an elegant veil half covering her face; hugging herself, the girl confronts the camera with a tough stare (page 37). Life ran Mark's photographs in 1983, and the following year she went back to Seattle with her husband, the filmmaker Martin Bell, and McCall to make a documentary about the runaways. Like the magazine story, the film centred on Tiny; its gritty realism earned it an Academy Award nomination in 1985 as Best Documentary. Mark has kept in touch with Blackwell, now the unmarried mother of seven children, and has returned to Seattle repeatedly to photograph her. Mark has been called upon to produce photo stories on a wide range of topics, from Camp Goodtimes, a camp in Malibu for children with incurable diseases, to the white-supremacist group Aryan Nations, at their Idaho encampment. She has also taken part in the projects known collectively as 'A Day in the Life', in which prominent photojournalists from around the world are asked to photograph in a given country on a given day, with the results gathered in a book that provides a cross-section of that society. Typically, for her contributions to both 'A Day in the Life of Spain' (page 49) and 'A Day in the Life of Ireland' (pages 85 and 87) she asked to photograph gypsies, yet another kind of outsider; also typically, some of her best pictures from those shoots have been of children. Mark has continued to undertake larger projects as well. In 1967 she was commissioned by Life magazine to photograph a California family, the Damms, who had lost their home and were living out of their car and a homeless shelter in North Hollywood. She spent ten days with them, producing several memorable pictures, most notably one taken on her last day on the story, of the family in their car facing the camera with grim expressions (page 47). Mark refers to that image as 'a Dustbowl picture', recalling the great pictures of homeless migrants made in the 1930s by Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans and others. Increasingly Mark has found it difficult to get financial support for her projects. Times have changed: where magazines like Life and Look once brought powerful, emotionally moving photo-essays by W. Eugene Smith, Margaret Bourke-White and others into millions of homes every week, today, 24-hour news channels and the internet offer instant access to breaking news. At the same time, audiences often seem to suffer from compassion fatigue. Assaulted by television and newspapers images of shocking atrocities and persistent social ills, many people can no longer respond adequately to the terrible scenes they are shown. Documentary photography has always drawn much of its power from the implicit belief that social ills could be cured if only they were clearly recognized and confronted. Many people today have lost faith in the possibility that problems such as homelessness and drug addiction can ever be solved. To a great extent the decline in the audience for documentary photography simply reflects a general loss of optimism about the possibility of alleviating entrenched social problems. Mark's ability to work successfully within documentary photography's changed circumstances is shown by her extended study of the insular and, for Western audiences, exotic world of Indian travelling circuses. For six months in 1989 and 1990, she photographed itinerant circuses in India, travelling with them from town to town, photographing performers and animal acts both in the ring and behind the scenes. She financed the trip with a mix of support: a promise from Life that the magazine would run some of the pictures she took, a small grant from Eastman Kodak Company and her own money. The resulting pictures are among the most important she has ever taken. A small community full of colourful characters of the sort Mark has always been drawn to, the circus is also a place where the line between everyday life and theatre is constantly blurred. In photographing it she focused not on the crowds or the performances themselves, but on the performers and the animals they work with. The overwhelming majority of the images are portraits of people used to being in the spotlight; they are celebrities of sorts, even though they are virtually anonymous outside their small world. Mark presents the performers as ordinary people who do extraordinary things. In one photograph, a young contortionist poses for the camera twisted back on herself, so that her head is between her feet (page 65). Next to her she keeps her tiny white puppy, its forehead marked with a spot of colour that echoes her own. Many of these pictures are touched with gentle humour. In another well-known image from the project, an elephant tamer poses proudly, hands on hips, seemingly oblivious to the beast's massive trunk wrapped around his neck (page 67). The elephant, meanwhile, glances at the camera, as if awaiting our judgement as to whether or not to strangle his master. Mark went on to photograph circuses in Mexico and Vietnam. In each place she has made funny, elegant pictures - of a line-up of performing dogs in Vietnam, for example (page 95), or a young Mexican tightrope walker, posing in her ornately stitched costume and holding a striped umbrella (page 119). 'I could spend my whole life photographing circuses,' Mark says. 'They combine everything I'm interested in - they're ironic and corny at the same time. There's also something about a circus that's tragic, like a Fellini film.' After more than three decades as a photojournalist, Mark has become a major figure in her profession. She has been showered with honours: a Guggenheim Fellowship, grants from the National Endowment for the Arts; the Hasselblad Foundation International Award; an honorary doctorate from her alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania. She is in constant demand to teach workshops and give lectures at colleges. Her work has been published in over fifty books and countless magazine articles, and major exhibitions of her work have travelled to museums around the world. Recently the readers of American Photo magazine voted Mark the most influential woman photographer of all time. With all this acclaim, she continues to develop photographic projects, whether her own or suggested by magazine editors. She still pushes herself technically too, increasingly working with 4 x 5-inch view cameras and location lighting. One project Mark hopes to pursue further grew out of a magazine assignment to photograph the annual convention of twins held in Twinsburg, Ohio. 'I want to go back with a huge camera, to emphasize the similarities and differences between the twins,' she says. 'They're hard pictures to take; photos of twins have become a cliche, just like photos of poverty have become a cliche.' 'That's what so difficult about documentary photography,' she continues. 'You have to somehow find a way of getting around things we've all seen before. To try to see a subject like circuses in your own way is a challenge.' Mary Ellen Mark is one of most famous documentary photographers of her generation. What gives her pictures their emotional power is, paradoxically, less their documentary quality than her ability to search out and find dramatic moments that suggest metaphors for existence. Her photographs show us the lives of others, whether social outcasts or film stars, in all their strangeness and beauty. At the same time they enact deeper truths, of the sort usually reserved for the most far-reaching fiction. Top Biographical Timeline 1940 Born 20 March, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. 1962-1964 Completes degree in Painting and Art History, and MA in photojournalism, University of Pennsylvania. 1965-1966 Works as freelance photographer. Receives Fulbright Scholarship to photograph in Turkey. 1966 Moves to New York and continues to freelance. 1974 Publishes Passport, a collection of early work from her travels. 1974-1976 Teaches photography in Maine and in Mexico. 1976 Becomes a member of Magnum. First solo exhibition 'Bars' held at the Photographers Gallery, London. Documents the women of Ward 81, Oregon State Hospital. 'Ward 81' exhibition travels worldwide. 1977 Awarded National Endowment for the Arts Grant. 1978 Photographs prostitutes on Falkland Road, Bombay, India. 1979 Publishes Ward 81. Awarded second National Endowment for the Arts Grant. 1979-1961 Photographs Mother Teresa and her Missions of Charity in Calcutta. 1981 Publishes Falkland Road. Exhibition travels worldwide. Marries film director Martin Bell. 1982 Leaves Magnum. Awarded Leica Medal of Excellence for 'Falkland Road'. 1983 Photographs the street kids of Seattle for Life magazine article 'Streets of the Lost'. This receives Canon Photo Essayist Award and Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award Honorable Mention. 1985 For Life magazine she photographs at Camp Good Times. Story awarded Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award. Publishes Mother Teresa's Missions of Charity in Calcutta. Works on Streetwise, film documenting the lives of the young people she met while working on 'Streets of the Lost'. 1987 Receives the Photographer of the Year Award from The Friends of Photography. Photo graphs the Damm family for Life magazine. 1988 Publishes Streetwise. Receives many awards, including World Press Award for Outstanding Body of Work Throughout the Years, George W. Polk Award for Photojournalism, Distinguished Photographer's Award for Women In Photography. 1989 Receives Best Photojournalism Award from The World Hunger Media for 'Children of Poverty' story in Life magazine. 1990 Receives Magazine Portrait/ Personality Picture of the Year Award for 'The Face of Rural Poverty' story in Fortune magazine. Awarded third National Endowment for the Arts Grant. 1991 Publishes Mary Ellen Mark: 25 Years. 'Indian Circus: Platinum Prints , exhibition, New York. 1992 'Mary Ellen Mark: 25 Years' exhibition travels worldwide. Receives Victor Hasselblad Cover Award. 1993 Publishes Indian Circus. Produces two films by Martin Bell, American Heart and The Amazing Plastic Lady. 1994 Awarded Guggenheim Fellowship. 1996 Publishes A Cry For Help: Stories of Homelessness and Hope. Receives Picture of the Year award for 'The Sins of the Father' published in Life magazine. 1997 Awarded Hasselblad Foundation Grant. Receives Infinity Award from the ICP, New York. 1998 Publishes Mary Ellen Mark: American Odyssey. 2000 'Strange Moments' exhibition, Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York. 'Mary Ellen Mark: American Odyssey' exhibition opens in Sweden and travels throughout Scandinavia. |
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