TIME Mary Ellen Mark American Beauty THE ARTS/PHOTOGRAPHY MAY 29, 2000 VOL. 155 NO. 22 A SUPERB SHOW THAT LOOKS BENEATH THE SURFACE BY RICHARD LACAYO Good pictures get to the point. It's great pictures that don't. Sometimes they have no point to get to. They don't try to simplify matters but to complicate them, to add nuance upon nuance and keep all judgments suspended. In the Mary Ellen Mark show that opened this month at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, there are dozens of good pictures. There are some great pictures too. For Mark, the Philadelphia show, which runs through Aug. 6 and then moves to Fort Wayne, Ind., New York City and San Francisco, is a homecoming. In the early 1960s she studied painting and art history at the University of Pennsylvania, then discovered that studio work was too solitary. The camera got her out of the house and onto the street, which it turns out is where she belongs. At age 60, Mark is now one of the pre-eminent American photographers. In the 26 years since the appearance of her first book of photographs, Passport, she has found a way to look at people who are in foolish situations and come out with pictures that are more complicated than satire. In the same way, she can work among people in painful circumstances and make tender but dry-eyed summations of their predicaments. The characters in her pictures can be simultaneously comical and admirable, sinister and hapless, strange and familiar. You never know entirely what to make of them. She wouldn't want you to. Mark came of age at a moment when a lot of young photographers were looking at the unsentimental pictures of Robert Frank, William Klein and Diane Arbus and wondering whether their saturnine styles could be fitted to the warmer aims of documentary photography. Arbus, especially, didn't seem to take much interest in the people in her pictures for themselves. What she cared about was how they could function as emblems of the various beasts within us. Mark is not such a remote operator. She plainly does care about the struggling families and strenuously upbeat old people she has photographed. But if she learned a lot from the work of compassionate photo essayists like W. Eugene Smith, she has never lost touch with the part of herself that responded to the cool eye Arbus cast on the spectacle each of us sometimes makes of ourselves. All of which has something to do with the odd power of a picture like Amanda and Her Cousin Amy. Mark knows something about the way children learn the poses of adulthood, the ones that will do them only so much good as adults. The barely postpubescent girl who flourishes her cigarette at us in a swimming pool looks as if she has already learned the ropes. Whether those are the ropes worth learning is an open question. It may even be the question in the anxious eyes of that little girl wading behind her, the one who could well be a stand-in for all the misgivings we've ever had about the ways of the world. Like Arbus, Mark also enjoys the ways in which people construct fantasies of themselves, like the old girl in a ballroom gown who has been happily swept off her feet by a dance partner in Jerry Hill and Margaret Sell. In another shot, Vera Antinoro, Rhoda Camporato and Murray Goldman, two aging glamour girls strut their stuff, what there is of it. They may seem at first to be clueless about themselves, until you realize that they are onto something about all of us, something that has to do with the need to persevere in roles that give us pleasure, at whatever cost to our dignity. The flesh may be weak here--to say nothing of creased, puckered and pooched--but the spirit is all too willing. Because it includes only work Mark has done in the U.S., the Philadelphia show, which was organized by Michael E. Hoffman and Melissa Harris of the Aperture Foundation, leaves out the prostitutes and circus performers that she has photographed in India and her bloodcurdling pictures of junkies shooting up in London. But two long sections are given over to a couple of Mark's best-known projects. One is a series of portraits of the Damms, a California family she first came upon in 1987 when they were homeless and living mostly out of their car. Seven years later, she photographed them again, when they were squatters on an abandoned ranch. In some of the pictures the parents, both heavy drug users, look like pure arsenic--dark-eyed, doped up and listless, though capable of loving gestures, all of which only makes more affecting how much their children seem to need them anyway. In one devastating picture, Crissy, Dean and Linda Damm, daughter Crissy looks up at us from the bed she shares with her father and mother. On the shabby dresser beside her there's a hash pipe, a Pepsi bottle and a plastic statuette of the Virgin Mary. Her sleeping father's arm is wrapped around her, but his affections are probably a mixed blessing. At the center of the picture is the face of a girl literally hemmed in by a world she seems appalled to have realized is hers. She gazes upward from the debris with an expression somewhere between foreboding and resignation. Sixteen years ago, Mark's pictures of teenage runaways in Seattle, which she had shot for a 1983 photo essay for LIFE magazine, became the basis for Streetwise, the Oscar-nominated documentary that she produced and that her husband Martin Bell directed. Mark has kept in touch with Erin ("Tiny") Blackwell, who was featured in that film, taking pictures at various moments of Tiny's precarious life. Ten of them make a rake's progress along one wall in Philadelphia. Tiny appears first as a pretty, enclosed 12-year-old, then as a pregnant teenager, then as a haggard-looking 30-year-old with a shopworn and sometimes angry mother. In an afterword to the show's catalog, Mark tells us that Tiny is now a single mother with five children by five different fathers. But in the book's final shot we see her from above, half submerged under the bubbles in the carton of her bathtub, a pillowy woman with a tentative expression, not satisfied certainly, but not devastated. She seems to say, "Well, it's come to this so far." The lines of the picture converge just above her head, where your eye takes in a small cake of soap. It's the quiet emblem of all hopes for a clean start. None of these stories, it seems to say, is over till it's over END Philadelphia Citypaper.net Eye on America June 1-8 2000 Photographer Mary Ellen Mark captures the harsh realities — and the silly side — of American life. by John Grant Looking at Mary Ellen Mark's American photographs at the Philadelphia Museum of Art you often come upon images of such touching intimacy and sadness that you ask yourself: How did she get that shot? How did she make herself such a trusted person in the lives of these people that they would willingly reveal themselves so thoroughly? One of America's foremost documentary photographers, Mark, 60, is an undisputed master of the very tricky art of photographic access. Over the years, the Elkins Park native has ingratiated herself into the day-to-day life of a brothel in Bombay, India, a female mental ward in Oregon, the family life of the Aryan Nation in Idaho, Nazi kids in California, the ongoing life of a teenage prostitute and her friends in Seattle, and a wonderfully photogenic homeless family living in their car in California named — one can only marvel at these things — Damm. In an age when photographers (and the photo editors and publications behind them using their images) are often as trustworthy as a used car salesman, it is a testament to Mark's integrity that many of her subjects sustain a relationship with her and even call to update her on what they're doing. In some cases, she has returned to document their troubled lives anew. Mark calls herself a photographer of Social Documentary. Some of her work is of her own initiative; much of it, especially her later work, is commissioned for magazines such as Life, Rolling Stone, The New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker. Often, she uses magazine and commercial work to finance her more personal documentary work. Her honors include three National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, an honorary degree from The University of Pennsylvania (her alma mater), a World Press Award for Outstanding Body of Work, and being voted "Most Influential Woman Photographer of All Time" by the readers of American Photo magazine. In the realm of photographic access Mark feels being a woman is a plus. "In all other life experiences it's harder being a woman," she has said. "But I think for a woman photographer — as a photojournalist particularly — the whole idea of access becomes easier because people are less threatened by a woman." This was especially key in photographing the Damm family in 1987 and, later, in 1994, when they were out of their car and squatting in an abandoned ranch. "The extremely macho Dean Damm," she said, "would have definitely been threatened by the presence of a man taking photographs of his family." Looking at the 11 incredible images of this family in the PMA exhibit reveals a lot about Mark. The work is done in all formats: 35 mm, 120 mm and 4-by-5 sheet film. The lighting, when and if fill-flash is used, is technically right on and in no way calls attention to itself. And, except for two of the images where subjects are looking at the camera, it's as if Mark is not there — the proverbial fly on the wall. Each image in the series, as is Mark's expressed goal, works both as a single powerful image and as part of a narrative whole. In classic documentary tradition, all sorts of issues are raised visually. On one end, there's the obvious matter of poverty in America, while on the other, there are questions that run the gamut of dysfunctional, abusive family life. Then, there are those sticky meta-issues of access and exploitation, as well as the viewer-located matter of voyeurism. As her artist's statement stresses, Mark is letting her "photographs be a voice for people who have less of an opportunity to speak for themselves." Looked at in light of the compassion fatigue that characterizes our TV culture, however, it is a matter of who's using whom. Whether the Damm family gained some advantage from the photos, or, as is the perennial question with social documentary photography, whether the images contributed to some kind of structural change that uplifted the lives of the subjects and class represented — there's no way to really know. We do know the series is very important for Mark's body of work and her career; and, indeed, it is now being used as a marketing feature to publicize this exhibit. As for how much true empathy any viewer extends to the Damm family and what they represent, and how much of the interest in them is momentary voyeurism, this is probably a matter of where one falls on a continuum of those two postures. But let's not go down that road. Let's give Mark the benefit of the doubt, and her due. The Damm series and the rest of her photography giving voice to the voiceless represents some of the finest social documentary work since that of Farm Security Agency photographers in the 1930s like Dorothea Lange, whose famous Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California, 1936 image resonates eerily with The Damm Family In Their Car, Los Angeles, California, 1987, which has to be one of the most disturbing, iconic images of an American family from the last two decades. Other examples of Mark's work are resonant with the eccentric world of the late Diane Arbus. There's Mark's twins series; there's the very large women from the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance; there's her sad and touching transvestites; and, an image of a hardened and hate-filled child right out of an Arbus side show, Pro-Vietnam War Parade, New York City, 1968. All of this seriousness and desperation is fortunately leavened by a number of marvelously funny pictures, such as Wet T-shirt Contest, Spring Break, Daytona Beach, Florida, 1991 in which a well-endowed beauty is receiving a more-bracing-than-she-anticipated pitcher of ice water down her cleavage and, my favorite, Yawning Dog, Williams, Arizona, 1988, an image of amazing comic timing that ranks up there with the work of dog master photographer, Elliot Erwitt. This show of 135 black-and-white prints is the debut of a traveling exhibition sponsored by The Aperture Foundation. Taking up two lower galleries, the 16-by-20-inch prints are strikingly presented in white mats and frames against a photo-gray wall. All images are printed full-frame; that is, a black line is evident around the edge indicating the image was cropped "in camera" and not in the darkroom, something quite sacred to Mark and many photographers. Aperture has published an accompanying book of the photographs called American Odyssey. Mary Ellen Mark: Photographs, The Berman and Stieglitz Galleries, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 26th St. and the Parkway, through Aug. 6, 215-763-8100. END New York Times Book Review Books in Brief April 30, 2000 by Andrea Barnet "A lot Like Us" For more than 30 years, the photographer Mary Ellen Mark has been preoccupied with depicting societies voiceless and disregarded, the tough, unkempt fringes of the culture, the outcasts as well as the unsightly. Mark has photographed runaway street kids in Seattle, prostitutes and pimps in Bombay, inmates of prisons and mental wards–not with the intent of exploiting these images for their shock value, but to reveal the common spark of humanity that links them to us. In MARY ELLEN MARK: American Odyssey (Aperture, $50.00), the black-and-white photographs continue to challenge our preconceptions, though her focus is on our country?s eccentric as well as its outcasts. Here are photographs of a baby beauty pageant and senior citizens in dance classes, rodeos in Texas, Coney Island bodybuilders and Christian bikers. Images of celebrities abound as well: an aged Henry Miller with a companion, the blues singer Etta James sporting a flamboyant black feather hat. Some of the most poignant photographs are those of the Damm family, homeless when Mark first shot them living in their car in 1987, and again in 1994 squatting on an abandoned ranch. Also haunting are several updated portraits of a woman called Tiny, first photographed in Seattle as a 12–year-old street child, now shown middle-aged and naked in her bathtub, a single mother of five. Unlike Diane Arbus, to whom she has been unjustly compared, Mark emotionally engages her subjects, and through this bond we as viewers, are drawn in too. END