Mary Ellen Mark (1940–2015) was an American photojournalist. Celebrated for a 40 year-career mixing documentary and intimate portraiture, she was widely published in magazines including Time, Vanity Fair, Paris Match, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and Stern.
Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Mark studied painting and art history at the University of Pennsylvania. She also earned a master’s degree in photojournalism from the University of Pennsylvania. She published her first book, Passport (1974,) a selection of her photographs 1963–73.
Mark gained celebrity in 1976 for her photographic record of the human condition with both compassion and objectivity. She stayed two months in a high-security women’s ward at the Oregon State Hospital. She captured the moods and ongoing anxieties of mentally ill women confined to a locked ward. The resulting images were published in Ward 81 (1979.)
A frequent visitor to India, mark produced Falkland Road: Prostitutes of Bombay (1981,) Photographs of Mother Teresa’s Missions of Charity in Calcutta, India (1985,) and Indian Circus (1993.)
Mark’s other well-known works include the documentary film Streetwise (1984) about the dispossessed people she had photographed in Seattle and, A Cry for Help: Stories of Homelessness and Hope (1996,) portraits of homeless residents of New York City.
In all, Mark produced 18 books, including the massive retrospectives Exposure (2005.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Mary Ellen Mark
I think you have to have a real point of view that’s your own. You have to tell it your way. And, I think that it’s a mistake to shoot for a specific magazine’s point of view because it’s never going to be as good. You have to shoot for yourself and photograph the way you believe it.
—Mary Ellen Mark
Topics: Photography
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 merly decorative. Some photographers use it brilliantly to make visual statements combining color and content; otherwise it is empty.
—Mary Ellen Mark
Topics: Photography
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