Muse: Mary Ellen Mark
Photographer, documentarian, humanist: we salute Mary Ellen Mark, one of the 20th century’s great image makers.
Over a five-decade career, award-winning photographer Mary Ellen Mark shot unforgettable pictorials for the likes of LIFE, The New York Times and Rolling Stone, published 18 books, held countless exhibitions and captured evocative behind-the-scenes images on over 100 major films. From Fellini’s Satyricon to Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now to Baz Luhrmann’s Australia, if you’re looking at an especially striking on-set photo, there’s a good chance it’s Mark’s. But her greatest achievement may have been her empathy in portraying society’s outsiders, most famously in her 1984 documentary, Streetwise. “I feel an affinity for people who haven’t had the best breaks in society,” Mark said. “What I want to do more than anything is acknowledge their existence.”
Born in suburban Philadelphia on March 20, 1940, Mark caught the shutter bug taking photos on her Box Brownie camera as a kid, and went on to earn a BFA from the University of Pennsylvania in 1962. “I remember the first time I went out on the street to shoot pictures,” she would later recall. “I thought: ‘I love this. This is what I want to do forever.’ There was never another question.”
After doing her masters in photojournalism, she picked up a Fulbright Scholarship to shoot in Turkey, which would produce the material for her first book, Passport (1974). During the ’60s, Mark took up residence in New York and chronicled the women’s liberation movement, anti-war protests and transvestite culture, while developing an interest in exploring homelessness, drug addiction and prostitution.
In the ’70s, she spent six weeks living with the patients of the women’s maximum-security ward in Oregon State Psychiatric Hospital, resulting in her fascinating book Ward 81 (1979), and travelled to India to meet with sex workers for Falkland Road: Prostitutes of Bombay (1981).
In 1983, while on assignment, Mark began photographing homeless kids around the streets of Seattle. Mark’s raw, vibrant images of the ragtag group of teens she befriended would form the basis for her and husband Mark Bell’s documentary Streetwise, a deeply humanist portrait of the prostitutes, drug dealers and panhandlers who were barely into their adolescence. The film would be nominated for an Oscar and inspire Mark’s 1988 book of the same name. In 2015, Mark caught up with the film’s breakout performer, former teen prostitute Tiny, for her final acclaimed work, Streetwise Revisited.
Mark received the Lifetime Achievement in Photography Award from George Eastman House in 2014, and passed away the following year. “I don’t want to feel that I’m missing out on experiencing as much as I can,” she once remarked. “For me, experiencing is knowing people all over the world and being able to photograph.” She certainly did.
