AT A GLANCE
- Known for
- Long, close projects with people on the edges of society: Ward 81, Tiny and the street kids of Seattle, Falkland Road, Twins
- Worked in
- Mostly black and white on Kodak Tri-X; color for Falkland Road
- Camera
- Mostly small 35mm cameras with short lenses; also medium format, 4x5, and the giant 20x24 Polaroid
- Also
- Special stills photographer on more than 100 film sets; member of Magnum from 1977 to 1981
- Start with
- Tiny: Streetwise Revisited (Aperture, 2015)
- Links
Mary Ellen Mark (1940–2015) was an American documentary photographer from the Philadelphia area. For more than four decades she photographed people many others overlooked, often staying with them for weeks or returning for years. Her work on a women's psychiatric ward in Oregon and on street children in Seattle made her one of the best-known photographers of her time.
The story
In 1975 Mary Ellen Mark was at Oregon State Hospital in Salem. Milos Forman was filming One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest there, and she was taking still photographs. On a tour of the hospital she saw Ward 81. It was the only locked security ward for women in the state. The women there stayed on her mind.
Getting back in was not easy. For nearly a year she wrote to the hospital's director, Dr. Dean Brooks. Then, in February 1976, she and the writer Karen Folger Jacobs were allowed to live on the ward. They stayed 36 days. At first the women only watched her. “I didn’t propose a threat to them,” she said later. “Slowly, they got used to me.”
Shock was never the goal. “I didn’t want to show them as exotically crazy,” she told Time in 1978. “I wanted to do an essay on the personalities of people who are locked away.” In one frame Laurie lies in the ward bathtub and looks straight up into the lens. The book Ward 81 came out in 1979.
Her path to that ward had started early. At nine she took pictures with a Box Brownie. She studied painting and art history at the University of Pennsylvania, then returned for a master's in photojournalism in 1964. A Fulbright Scholarship sent her to Turkey for a year to photograph.
In 1983 Life magazine sent her to Seattle with the writer Cheryl McCall, for a story about runaway children. On Pike Street she met Erin Blackwell, a 13-year-old everyone called Tiny. “She was beautiful, engaging, and impossible to forget,” Mark said. That Halloween, Tiny dressed up in a black dress, black gloves and a hat with a veil.
Her husband, the filmmaker Martin Bell, then made the documentary Streetwise with the same kids. For many photographers the job would have ended there. Instead, Mark kept going back to Tiny for more than thirty years, as Tiny grew up and had ten children. The book Tiny: Streetwise Revisited came out in autumn 2015, a few months after Mark died.
It all began with a locked door in Oregon and a year of letters. Again and again, she stayed longer than any assignment asked. “What I want to do more than anything,” she said, “is acknowledge their existence.”
The work
- 1940Born on March 20 in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania
- 1962BFA in painting and art history, University of Pennsylvania
- 1964Master's in photojournalism, Annenberg School for Communication
- 1965Fulbright Scholarship to photograph in Turkey for a year
- 1976Lives 36 days on Ward 81, Oregon State Hospital
- 1983Life assignment in Seattle; meets Tiny on Pike Street
- 2003Twins wins first prize in the Arts at World Press Photo
- 2014Lifetime Achievement in Photography Award, George Eastman House
- 2015Dies on May 25 in New York City
Lessons
Stay longer than the job. She lived on Ward 81 for 36 days and followed Tiny for more than thirty years. Trust came with time.
Be patient about access. She wrote to the hospital for nearly a year before she could photograph the women of Ward 81.
Look for the person, not the label. On the ward she wanted to show personalities, not illness. Her pictures of Tiny show a girl, not only a street kid.
Try this: choose one person or place you can return to. Photograph it once a month for a year, and at the end lay the pictures side by side.
Gear
Mark changed formats to suit the project. She did not do her own darkroom work.
Box Brownie: her first camera, at the age of nine.
35mm camera: her main tool. She mostly used small, hand-held 35mm cameras and liked to work close to people with short lenses. Leica's LFI magazine called her a classic Leica photographer.
Medium format and 4x5 view camera: she also worked with medium format and a 4x5 inch view camera.
20x24 Polaroid camera: she used this huge studio camera for her portraits of twins at the Twins Days Festival in Ohio, from 1998 to 2002.
Kodak Tri-X film: she worked mostly in black and white on Tri-X.
Books
Tiny: Streetwise Revisited (Aperture, 2015). A 176-page expanded edition of Streetwise (1988), her study of homeless young people in Seattle. It adds her long project following Tiny over thirty years, most of it never published before. The texts and captions come from conversations between Tiny and Mark and from Martin Bell, and Isabel Allende and John Irving are listed as contributors. It was her last book, and the best place to see how she returned to one person over a lifetime.
Ward 81: Voices (Steidl, 2023). An expanded edition of the 1979 book Ward 81, edited by Martin Bell, Julia Bezgin and Meredith Lue. Its 288 pages hold 141 images, including photographs never published before, excerpts from Karen Folger Jacobs's interviews with the patients, recorded talks between Mark and Jacobs, and new essays on the project's influence. A large clothbound book for anyone who wants the full story of the 36 days on the ward. An earlier edition, Ward 81 (Damiani, 2008), with a foreword by Milos Forman, is smaller and may be easier to find.
Mary Ellen Mark on the Portrait and the Moment (Aperture, 2015). The fourth book in Aperture's Photography Workshop Series, 128 pages in paperback. Mark explains how she works: how to earn a subject's trust, how to make pictures that feel controlled but not forced, and how to arrange the frame so that everything in it serves the story. It also goes behind some of her best-known photographs. Written for photographers at any level.
The Book of Everything (Steidl, 2020). A three-volume retrospective edited by her husband and collaborator Martin Bell, ordered by date. To make it, Bell looked through more than two million frames on her contact sheets. It is the widest view of her whole career, for readers who already know her famous pictures and want to see everything around them.
What is an iconic picture? Is it a picture that other photographers worship? Or perhaps it is a timeless photo? What does it actually take to make a picture that has such an impact on viewers it becomes iconic?