Mary Ellen Mark
The acclaimed documentary photographer talks to Geoff Harris about her rich career, and the diversity of the lives that have been captured by her lens
A lifetime of photography in The Digital Camera Interview
hether she is photographing circus performers, homeless prostitutes, prom queens or sick kids, Mary Ellen’s humanity and empathy with the subject shines through; but she is never sentimental or mawkish.
There is a rigour and purity to her photographic style, characterised by tight, dramatic compositions and a strong narrative flow that are partly the result of shooting so many commissions for some of the 20th century’s greatest magazines. Although she’s well-known for her projects photographing outsiders and the marginalised, Mary Ellen has also found fame as a photographer of movie actors and directors: she was present on the set of films such as Fellini’s Satyricon, Apocalypse Now and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
Mary Ellen was born in suburban Philadelphia, and studied fine arts and photography and communications at the University of Pennsylvania. Following a Fulbright Program scholarship trip to Turkey, she moved to New York in 1966, with the goal of photographing people and creating documentary essays on social situations.
Roll up, roll up...
After gradually making her name as a freelancer, Mary Ellen got a major break in 1969, when the magazine Look sent the then-29-year-old to photograph Federico Fellini working on the set of his controversial movie, Satyricon. “Fellini was the director who most inspired me; I loved his sense of magic,” she says.
Mary Ellen spent three months on the set and shot more than 4,000 images in her quest to capture Fellini’s genius. “I was very young and intimidated by everything. I’m still intimidated, actually. You learn to deal with it and live with it...” This period with Fellini also inspired Mary Ellen’s interest in
the circus and carnival performers, through his movie La Strada.
After finishing the Fellini project, Mary Ellen came to the UK to work on a project with heroin addicts, and then to India, a country which has been a rich source of inspiration ever since. “I fell in love with the Indian circus on my first trip there in 1969.” As she explains in the preface to her book
Indian Circus, she was struck by the beauty and innocence of the shows. “I vividly remember seeing a huge hippo in a pink tutu being coached to walk around the ring with his mouth open. At the end, he was rewarded with an enormous cotton-candy cone.”
Mark Ellen was also fascinated by the relationship between the circus performers and the animals, and the bonds that kept a community of people together on the road.
Living soap opera
Another of her famous Indian projects was Falkland Road, where she was commissioned to shoot prostitutes on the eponymous Bombay street (then one of the cheapest places in the city for sex workers). The Falkland Road project was unusual as it was shot in colour, something which Mary Ellen admits was a challenge. “As a photographer, I think in black and white. Colour adds an extra element. I think it’s a different way of seeing without colour, and the subjects that I have been most interested in also translate themselves better to black and white.”
It was tough for other reasons too. As the only foreign woman photographer in a notorious red-light district, Mary Ellen attracted crowds of dodgy men, while the prostitutes would shower her with insults
“The subjects that I have been most interested in translate themselves better to black and white”
and garbage. She was even punched in the face by a drunken punter, but kept going back to this “living soap opera” until she won the trust of the working girls and the madams, and got the images she needed.
While there is direct eye contact in some of the Falkland Road images, much of the work is candid, and Mary Ellen has always described herself as a street photographer. “I love doing candid work – probably more so than formal portraits, which I also do. It’s very challenging, as you have to try and stay unobtrusive.” Mark Ellen also photographed Mother Theresa’s Missions of Charity in Calcutta for Life magazine, which resulted in a two-month stay and another book.
Meeting Tiny
Mary Ellen may have done some of her best work in India, but she is also rightly celebrated as an American photographer,
with a particular focus on what it’s like to grow up in the USA. A commission from Life took her and reporter Cheryl McCall to Seattle in the early 1980s, where she photographed street kids and runaways. They chose Seattle as it was dubbed ‘America’s Most Liveable City’, and was not as notorious for juvenile homelessness as Los Angeles or San Francisco.
During this project, Mary Ellen shot one of her most iconic images – Rat and Mike, toting a gun – and also met a girl called Tiny, then a 13-year-old prostitute.
“I love doing candid work. It’s very challenging, as you have to try and stay unobtrusive”
Tiny became something of a muse to Mary Ellen, and their photographic relationship continues to this day. “I’ve learnt that when photographing kids you don’t treat them as kids, you treat them as adults. But you have to control them, not let them control you.”
Along with her husband, the film-maker Martin Bell, Mary Ellen has been working with Tiny for 30 years. “I’d say it’s the most complex project I’ve done. There is nothing exotic about it; it’s just about Tiny’s life and those of her 10 children. How to make the images powerful and stand on their own is hard.” Mary Ellen and Martin raised funds through Kickstarter to make a film update about Tiny, and their work is ongoing.
Life lessons
You pigeonhole Mary Ellen Mark at your peril, While she’s photographed a lot of underprivileged kids, her most recent book in 2012 was on high-school proms, featuring some subjects from quite wealthy backgrounds. She set about capturing a wide range of proms – “a rite of passage that has always been one of the most important rituals of American youth” – with a Polaroid 20x24 land camera, as she loved the quality of its film, and the immediacy of the results.
“The biggest thing I have learned about portrait photography is that you have to take control,” she explains. “The person there needs to have the confidence in you that you can control them, that you know what you’re doing. When you ask them to stand here or stand there or look that way, it comes from a certain amount of confidence.”
Creating the Prom book took a lot of perseverance and wrestling with bureaucracy, but Mark Ellen has never been someone to give up easily. This inner toughness also comes through in the way she teaches students of photography. Mary Ellen regularly runs workshops in Oaxaca, Mexico, and has also more recently taught in Reykjavík, Iceland.
While she is kind and empathetic, she is also very clear that “you have to push students, that is the whole art of teaching to push them to be themselves. Some of my students do documentary work, and some are very abstract. But whatever they do, they have to do it in their own way.”
Mary Ellen has enjoyed an amazing career, and speaks of how lucky she was to get so many inspiring magazine commissions. Looking back on her career, which project or story is she proudest of, and why? “It’s hard to say, as they are so different. For me, it’s always the next one that gets me excited. What that will be, I’m not sure yet...”
“The biggest thing I have learned about portrait photography is that you have to take control”