Photographs Copyright © Mary Ellen Mark
Text Copyright © 2002 VUEF/Nathan

Preface

From circus acrobats to Hollywood stars, from sordid brothels to psychiatric wards, from India to America...

From her earliest beginnings in photography, Mary Ellen Mark has always trained a singular gaze upon the world. Film, like photographers, feeds off the visible. No referent; no image: images spring forth from the conjugated presence of subject, camera and photographer. Every photographer must plow into reality, whatever the cost. Mary Ellen Mark's way of apprehending the world is above all a way of apprehending people. And in her work, her physical and sensitive proximity to the other is strikingly obvious. There is no desire to put the exotic, extraordinary or monstrous on display—nothing sensational. Just the ever-renewed experience of the presence of others in their daily lives, captured in their social environment, frozen in the inertia of the image, laid flat by photography.

It is difficult to categorize her work, to put a label on it, because Mary Ellen Mark is always on the border between photojournalism, documentary photography, and portraiture. One could run the risk of saying that, taken as a whole, she is a "social portraitist". And it is here, in this singular capacity to capture the real, in this crossing of different photographic genres, that the attraction of her images lies.

After studying painting and art history at the University of Pennsylvania, in 1962, she began by shooting first her own city, then in 1965, having received a grant, she traveled to Turkey and Europe. Already the same intention was revealed: her desire to confront the other, through the brutality of the image, yet with a certain delicacy. That was to lead her to encounter people with a stunning capacity to integrate and blend into the disparate worlds and social milieus she deciphers and explores – she began a photographic journey.

Ward 81

Upon returning to the United States, Mary Ellen Mark combined her assignments with her personal research. Her images appeared in such prestigious publications as Life and the New York Times Magazine. She was also the set photographer for a great many films, including Fellini's Satyricon, and, eventually, Milos Forman's One Flew Over a Cuckoo's Nest. Which is how she discovered Ward 81, the women's ward of the Oregon state psychiatric institution where the film was made. The following year, in 1976, Mary Ellen Mark obtained permission not only to photograph, but also to live in, the ward. The result is a poignant, harrowing body of work, which produced both a book and an exhibit called Ward 81.

Madness is seen from the inside here: no sense of voyeurism, but of confinement, vulnerability, violence and cracks. Women, young and old - empty stares, twisted hands, miserable bodies. Gaunt faces have threatening features and almost bestial expressions. Sometimes, on the contrary, we read distress, fear, and confusion. Sometimes, too, appeasement. These images tell us of loss and deprivation: loss of freedom, alteration of the mind, abandon of the body, mental alienation. The photographer seems to inhabit the place, to be aware of its rules, its regulations and deregulations. She does not restrain herself to a simple reportage inventory, her report cannot be summarized in a simple statement, "This is madness". She looks madness in the face, and touches its intimacy. These images are a trial, for her as for those who gaze upon them: by drawing attention to their humanity, she forces us to see these alienated women as our fellow creatures. With these hard, droll, frightening photographs, devoid of obscenity, Mary Ellen Mark proves her ability to blend into and access a difficult, nearly impenetrable environment, to discover it and offer it up for us to see and feel.

At this same period, she was already shooting the rich and famous. This is the period, in 1977, when she joined Magnum (she left the agency in 1982). Recognition came from both the public and the profession. She devotes herself to outsiders, to the alienated and to Hollywood stars with the same determination - no gap is unbridgeable. She can switch from one world to another, because for her, the point is always to find the proximity, the face-to-face photographic connection.

Her fascination for India, which she first discovered in 1968, perfectly illustrates this capacity to go beyond not only geographic gaps ones, but also social and cultural ones, in order to capture and share human lives.

Falkland Road

First, the shimmering colors. The red of the fabric catches fire against the electric blue of the walls. Slender or voluptuous amber-skinned bodies. Indifferent, lascivious, nonchalantly languorous beauties. Hard-eyed, melancholic faces. It could be the enchantment of distant lands, a sensual, carnal, spicy fantasy. It is Falkland Road, a teeming Bombay street lined with brothels, where women's bodies are bought and sold for a handful of rupees.

Mary Ellen Mark returned several times to Falkland Road, trying, on each journey, to shoot, to join the hustle and bustle of the life of the street. She comes up against the hostility of both the customers and the women, made manifest by thrown garbage and buckets of water. She returns again and again, without success. In 1978, she finally manages to progressively calm the aggression, attract the curiosity, and tame the prostitutes. Transvestites. Prostitutes of all ages. Young girls snatched and sold to "madams" in whorehouses. Teen-aged girls from the poorest families, sold by their mothers. Many of them still children. She meets the prostitutes in the street, the freest ones, the ones who work without pimps, but are beaten and robbed by their boyfriends, pickpockets for the most part. She gets to know the "cage girls" who lure customers in with a string of obscenities. She penetrates the secrets of brothels, where children are raised in corruption, and female pimps, both maternal and tyrannical, reign with undisputed power.

The images, like the ones that show the girls with their clients, are raw. They show and denounce the unbearable poverty and misery. It is most definitely a documentary about prostitution, but it goes beyond testimonial: through her gaze and interest, Mary Ellen Mark bestows dignity upon these prostitutes. She knows how to attract sympathy without resorting to the cheap tricks of pity or condescension.

The prostitutes, sublime and pathetic at the same time, are like derisory idols, stepping straight from the miniatures on the pages of some nightmarish version of the Kama Sutra. As Munni, a little, 15-year-old prostitute says, "the name tattooed on my arm is the only thing I can bring with me to death". In the photo, she is destitution incarnate. A slim little adolescent, naked, soaked, vulnerable, posing before a decrepit wall, on which we discern a water tap: she has just bathed. Her hands clasped before her genitals - a whore can be modest - she wears nothing but a thin chain around her neck, a slender bracelet, and a tattoo on her left arm.

Each photo delivers up its muteness and its secret, revealing itself to be a perpetual threshold for the gaze, a tacit opening onto the field of the possible, present in the image. We realize then that each of them carries within it a dramatic story that unfolds and is played out. These women have nothing but their bodies; they are crotches for rent. These women who are nothing acquire an identity, a concrete, overwhelming human reality. Because now we know something of their story and their condition.

This quasi-theatrical opening and the latent mystery included in the image are also found in the photographs Mary Ellen Mark shot in traveling circuses, in India once again, over a six-month period in 1989 and 1990 (after spending time on a long report about Mother Teresa). Like the brothels of Bombay, circuses constitute a microcosm that offers the photographer a privileged post for the observation of human society.

Indian Circus

It is a world peopled with surreal, fantastic creatures. Facetious or solemn gnomes in gaudy make-up. White rabbits popping out of hats. Winged creatures towing mysterious crews. Young girls with viper-like bodies - sinuous, pliable, vines twisting into impossible contortions. Placid trainers of wild or exotic animals.

A dwarf in clown make-up, with a tiny hat clamped onto his head, and extraordinarily miniscule feet, passes in front of the lens. In his arms, a half-naked, chubby little child, with kohl-rimmed eyes, lays his hand gently on the man's cheek (legend has it that he is the child's father). Behind him, far in the background, is what seems to be a vaguely discernible, hypothetical patched circus tent. Stretching from the tent to the man is a path - not a very long one - but a path nevertheless. Slowly, it dawns on us that the man has walked all that way. He is so terribly stunted, twisted, fragile. Yet he has delicately, tenderly carried this already-heavy child, of idol-like beauty, who is so singularly the man's diametrical opposite, and who exaggerates his father's deformity even more.

The fascinating image reconciles grace and tragedy.

The circus theme is a photographic cliché, yet Mary Ellen Mark was able to render its impact without slipping into the picturesque. Out of time, fabulously old-fashioned, derisory (as is much of what usually inspires this photographer), the circus is the crossroad of every contradiction. Mary Ellen Mark takes us through the mirror to a phantasmagoric wonderland. Wretchedness mingles with enchantment, poverty with drollery, and everything tips towards excess. Every circus is a closed circuit, a world within a world, composing a curious and rare condensation of human community, offering a captivating sphere of exploration for this photographer. Indeed, Mary Ellen Mark relived the experience, when she shot circuses in Vietnam and Mexico.

It is not the spectators but the animals and the performers that interest her - the actors, in other words - indeed, for these men and women, the spotlights are never far away, and the border between daily life and spectacle, which seem to intermingle, is a tenuous one. So we are never certain that the show is over. For the extraordinary is ordinary here.

Curiously, we find these eternally performing human beings, this world of spectacle - albeit a completely different spectacle - in the photographs Mary Ellen Mark took in the United States also. Once again, she has bridged the gaps and found the passages to other - at first glance, radically different - worlds; the connecting thread in all of her work is, inevitably, people.

An American Odyssey

Swamped as we are with a flood of images, films and products from the United States, it would seem that the American legend has been affecting us for a long time.

Each of us carries within them, however laughably or shamefully, their very own American dream.

An omen of the insidious fascination that America exercises upon us can be found in the Declaration of Independence: "...that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness".

The New World against the Old. Happiness as a right. One that everyone here seems to demand. Mary Ellen Mark has been crisscrossing the United States for more than 30 years, and everywhere we sense the same quest, be it latent or manifest, for legitimate happiness - at any price it would seem. Often, in her images, while the quest is palpable, actually acceding to the "American way of life" is something else entirely. The photographer transcribes little Tiny's comments, "I want to be rich, very rich... to live on a ranch with lots of horses, my favorite animal... I'll have at least three yachts... diamonds and jewelry, and lots of stuff like that". Eighteen years later: five children by as many fathers, welfare... and she hasn't stopped hoping. She still has the right to search, to repeat the offense, to make another attempt.

While Mary Ellen Mark's photographs don't probe the imposture of the American dream, they do expose it by unveiling the other side of the picture.

The American dream borders on the pathetic here. Poverty and distress mingle with the glitter. Like this little black girl, a carnival mermaid, whose illusions seem to be hopelessly confined to a flea-bitten bathroom, between a broomstick and a roll of toilet paper.

The abandoned, the prostitutes, the alienated, the gigolos, the bodybuilders are strewn throughout photographs that paint a fascinating composite portrait of a limping, disenchanted America. An obese woman in a ball-gown with a miniature dog licking her nose. Family photos proudly displayed in slum apartments. A provocative, overly made-up little girl in a bikini, smoking, while her feet dangle in a pool...

This American odyssey is more of a human adventure than an expedition.

When Mary Ellen Mark's gaze rests upon someone, it obviously carries the respect that she manifests towards those who cross her path. Her images make no concessions, yet it is most certainly in their very crudeness that their delicacy lies. Pitiless (for all that, she never succumbs to gratuitous cynicism), this photographer is not without compassion. The time that she dedicated to little Tiny, to the prostitutes in Bombay, as to most of her subjects, betrays the profound humanity that animates her. Mary Ellen Mark is, without a doubt, a woman of images. As she herself says, it is because she is a woman that she can achieve this consent, this abandonment of self, this abdication of modesty, that would, incontestably, be refused to a man's gaze. It is, too, through her capacity to blend in, integrate into and be accepted by the different milieus that she shoots. Neither moralist, nor partial, she knows how to create an effect without being overly sentimental.

Shooting photographs is always related to confrontation, to hostage-taking, to violence inflicted upon the other, for the one-and-one relationship is betrayed by the presence of the camera. This photographer feeds insatiably off the real, and yet, at no time does she behave like a predator. She says that she begins shooting as soon as she approaches her subjects. No stolen images. Those who agree to place themselves before her lens know that they are compromising themselves. No abuse, no illusions, no tricks.

For Mary Ellen Mark, the Indian whore is as important as the rich American. Humanity bursts out of and spills over from each of her images. Disturbing, off-putting, poignant, moving or ridiculous. That is the path she takes to make differences meet, to bridge gaps. Without ever falling into the trap of clichés or the picturesque. In a way, she demonstrates an immediate comprehension of the other, whatever their culture, lifestyle, religion, or condition... She knows how to capture and portray the expression of relentless determination to live in her subjects, whom she always apprehends in their social environment (circus, brothel, care facility...). And in her photographs, she knows how to reveal the instants of grace and discover the cruel paradoxes, to stigmatize laughable or pathetic social behavior, to show how everyone, through their attitude, tends to exist through the images they reflect. And, inexorably, what grabs and moves us is the other. The other is, for each of us, like another ephemeral self. And if Mary Ellen Mark's images sometimes provoke unease, fascination, compassion or mockery, if they engender turmoil, it is because they are a mirror the photographer holds up to each of us. For in the end, Mary Ellen Mark's photographic odyssey leads us to perceive a shred of the human condition.

Caroline Bénichou

Translated by Regan Kramer