Mary Ellen Mark
Mary Ellen Mark (1940-2015) was a renowned American photojournalist known for her poignant black-and-white photography that captured the lives of marginalized individuals, including the homeless, prostitutes, and mentally ill patients. Born in Philadelphia, she developed a passion for photography while studying at the University of Pennsylvania, where she obtained her bachelor’s and master’s degrees. Mark's career was marked by significant projects, including her immersive work at the Oregon State Mental Hospital, which resulted in the acclaimed book "Ward 81," and her documentation of street children in Seattle that led to the Oscar-nominated documentary "Streetwise."
Throughout her life, Mark produced eighteen photographic books and her work was featured in numerous prominent publications. She also chronicled the lives of women in Mumbai's brothels and captured images of Mother Teresa’s missions in Calcutta. Mark maintained a preference for film photography, believing it conveyed a stronger sense of reality. Her legacy continues to influence contemporary photography, and her impact has been recognized with various awards, including the Lifetime Achievement in Photography Award. After her passing, her husband, Martin Bell, has continued to promote her work and vision through various publications and films.
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Subject Terms
Mary Ellen Mark
Photographer
- Born: March 20, 1940
- Place of Birth: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
- Died: May 25, 2015
- Place of Death: New York, New York
Education: University of Pennsylvania; Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania
Significance: Mary Ellen Mark was considered one of the premier photojournalists of the late twentieth century. Mark's work focused on people, often capturing mostly black-and-white images of those who lived on the margins of society, including prostitutes, street kids, homeless families, and the mentally ill. Her work was featured in an Academy Award–nominated film, and she produced eighteen books of photographs during her career. Additional works were released posthumously.
Background
Mary Ellen Mark was born on March 20, 1940, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In high school, Mark was a cheerleader, and she did not aspire to become a photographer at the time. After graduation, she attended the University of Pennsylvania. There, she became friends with the actress Candice Bergen. Mark studied art history and painting, but she did not believe that she was skilled enough to make a career as a painter. After graduating with her bachelor's degree in 1962, Mark stayed at Penn for her master's degree. She randomly decided to study photojournalism and fell in love with photography. Bergen told the New York Times that Mark was extremely passionate about her art, even though she had just discovered it. Mark graduated from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania in 1964.
After obtaining her master's degree, Mark went to Turkey on a Fulbright scholarship. There, she captured one of her most famous images, Beautiful Emine Posing, Trabzon, Turkey (1965). The images she captured in Turkey were collected in her first book of photographs, Passport (1974).
Life's Work
Following her return to the United States, Mark shot stills for movies. She took photographs at the Oregon State Mental Hospital for the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975). While there, she developed a relationship with the hospital director, who agreed to allow her to live in Ward 81 for six weeks in 1976. Mark spent nearly two months living among the most severely mentally ill female patients at the hospital, capturing their vulnerability, dignity, and pain in her photos. She later said that she was interested in the subject because her own father had been hospitalized after suffering several mental breakdowns. Mark's work capturing the women at the hospital was published in a book called Ward 81 in 1979.
In 1978, Mark traveled to India, where she began profiling the prostitutes at the brothels in Bombay, now known as Mumbai. She faced violence and police raids there, but she was eventually able to befriend many of the prostitutes. Mark featured them in a series of color photographs that were published in the book Falkland Road: Prostitutes of Bombay in 1981. During her travels to India, Mark also profiled the work of Mother Teresa in Calcutta. The series of photographs was published by Life magazine and in the 1985 book Photographs of Mother Teresa's Missions of Charity in Calcutta.
In the early 1980s, she began working with her husband, filmmaker Martin Bell. Following an assignment profiling the lives of street kids in Seattle, Washington, Mark and Bell used her work as the basis for the 1984 documentary film called Streetwise, which profiled the homeless teens of Seattle. The film was nominated for an Academy Award, and Mark's photographs were collected in the book Streetwise in 1988.
Mark later returned to India to shoot circuses there. During her six months on the project, a chimpanzee attacked her, biting her hand. However, Mark continued taking pictures, which were collected in the book Indian Circus in 1993. The photographer also continued to profile people living on the fringes of society, capturing images of homeless children and families in New York. Mark's photos were collected in the book A Cry for Help in 1996.
A decade later, Mark traveled to Reykjavik, Iceland, to profile children with disabilities at two schools. These images were collected in the 2007 book Undrabörn: Extraordinary Child. She continued to focus on young people by traveling to proms around the United States and taking pictures of the attendees. She took pictures of teens at proms in Massachusetts, Texas, Virginia, and Los Angeles. Mark and Bell turned the series into a 2010 film called Prom, and Mark published a book of the same name in 2012.
Over the years, Mark and Bell continued to follow one of the teens they had profiled in Streetwise. Nicknamed Tiny, Erin Blackwell was a teen prostitute and addicted to drugs. The relationship the couple developed with Tiny was a deep one. They even took Tiny to the Academy Awards with them and spent holidays with her. Over the years, Mark continued meeting with Tiny and taking pictures of her growing family. The story of Tiny's journey from street kid to middle-aged mother of ten children is chronicled in the 2015 book Tiny: Streetwise Revisited.
In 2013, they began working on a film about Tiny. In 2016, a year after Mark's death, Bell released the documentary Tiny: The Life of Erin Blackwell. Bell continued to share his wife's view of the world in the years that followed. He published Mary Ellen Mark: The Book of Everything, a three-volume set containing more than five hundred of her images, in 2020. Bell and Mark's studio staff combed through audio recordings from her time in Ward 81 at Oregon State Hospital in 1976. Mark had envisioned a stream-of-consciousness film with the raw audio set against her images. Bell created this work, which he titled Moonlight Heaven Black (2023).
Throughout her career, Mark never truly embraced digital photography. Instead, she preferred film because she felt that it made her images more real. One of her favorite cameras, which she used for the images in her books Twins and Proms and when taking celebrity photographs, was a 20x24 Polaroid, which weighed 204 pounds and was six feet tall. It made no negative and produced a single image.
Impact
Mark was considered one of the greatest photojournalists of her time. Her work appeared in dozens of magazines over the years, including Rolling Stone, the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, and Life. Mark received many awards and honors for her work, including the Lifetime Achievement in Photography Award from George Eastman House and the Outstanding Contribution Photography Award from the World Photography Organization in 2014.
Personal Life
Mark married Martin Bell in the 1980s. In the 2010s, she developed myelodysplastic syndrome, a disease that affects the blood and bone marrow. Mark died of the disease on May 25, 2015, at a hospital in New York City. Her husband survived her.
Bibliography
"Books." Mary Ellen Mark, www.maryellenmark.com/books/books.html. Accessed 9 Oct. 2024.
Brodeur, Nicole. "Three Decades after 'Streetwise' Documentary, 'Tiny' Struggles and Dreams On." Seattle Times, 19 May 2016, www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/movies/three-decades-after-streetwise-documentary-tiny-struggles-and-dreams-on/. Accessed 8 Oct. 2024.
Calamur, Krishnadev. "Photographer Mary Ellen Mark Dies at 75." NPR, 26 May 2016, www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/05/26/409806219/photographer-mary-ellen-mark-dies-at-75. Accessed 8 Oct. 2024.
Chawkins, Steve. "Mary Ellen Mark Dies at 75; Acclaimed Documentary Photographer." Los Angeles Times, 27 May 2015, www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-mary-ellen-mark-20150528-story.html. Accessed 26 Sept. 2017.
Estrin, James. "Mary Ellen Mark, Photographer and Force of Nature." New York Times, 26 May 2015, lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/05/26/mary-ellen-mark-photographer-and-force-of-nature/. Accessed 8 Oct. 2024.
"Films." Mary Ellen Mark, 2023, maryellenmark.com/films. Accessed 9 Oct. 2024.
Gregory, Alicia. "5 Fast Facts: Mary Ellen Mark." National Museum of Women in the Arts, 20 Mar. 2024, nmwa.org/blog/5-fast-facts/5-fast-facts-mary-ellen-mark/. Accessed 8 Oct. 2024.
Grimes, William. "Mary Ellen Mark, Photographer Who Documented Difficult Subjects, Dies at 75." New York Times, 26 May 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/05/27/arts/design/mary-ellen-mark-photographer-who-documented-difficult-subjects-dies-at-75.html. Accessed 8 Oct. 2024.
Kampel, Stewart. "Mark, Mary Ellen." Encyclopaedia Judaica, edited by Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik, 2nd ed., vol. 13, Macmillan Reference USA, 2007, p. 548.
"Mary Ellen Mark." IMDb, www.imdb.com/name/nm0548266/?ref‗=nm‗ov‗bio‗lk. Accessed 9 Oct. 2024.