Mary Ellen Mark: Photographer of Society’s Margins
Mary Ellen Mark (20 March 1940 – 25 May 2015) was an American photographer known for her photojournalism, documentary photography, portraiture, and advertising work. She received the 2014 Lifetime Achievement in Photography Award from the George Eastman House and three Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards for her unflinching documentation of marginalized communities.
Early Life and Education
Mark was born and raised in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania. She began photographing at age nine with a Box Brownie camera and attended Cheltenham High School, where she served as head cheerleader and showed talent in painting and drawing. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting and art history from the University of Pennsylvania in 1962, then worked briefly in the Philadelphia city planning department before returning to graduate studies.
In 1964, she received a master’s degree in photojournalism from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. The following year, a Fulbright Scholarship took her to Turkey for a year of photography, during which she also traveled to England, Germany, Greece, Italy, and Spain. This experience produced her first book, Passport (1974).
Career and Achievements
Mark moved to New York City in 1966 or 1967 and spent the next several years photographing Vietnam War protests, the women’s liberation movement, transvestite culture, and Times Square. Her work consistently focused on social issues including homelessness, loneliness, drug addiction, and prostitution, with children appearing as recurring subjects throughout her career. She developed a distinctive approach: photographing people “away from mainstream society and toward its more interesting, often troubled fringes.”
For Ward 81 (1979), she lived for six weeks in the women’s security ward of Oregon State Hospital. For Falkland Road (1981), she spent three months with prostitutes working on a single street in Bombay. Her project “Streets of the Lost,” created with writer Cheryl McCall for Life magazine, became the book Streetwise (1988) and was adapted into a documentary film directed by her husband Martin Bell, with a soundtrack by Tom Waits.
Mark worked as a special stills photographer on more than 100 film sets, including Arthur Penn’s Alice’s Restaurant (1969), Mike Nichols’ Catch-22 (1970) and Carnal Knowledge (1971), Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), and Baz Luhrmann’s Australia (2008). She also photographed Federico Fellini on the set of Satyricon (1969) for Look magazine. Her technical range included 35mm, 120/220, 4×5-inch view cameras, and a 20×24 Polaroid Land Camera, primarily shooting in black and white on Kodak Tri-X film.
Mark joined Magnum Photos in 1977 and remained a member until 1981. She later joined Archive Pictures and opened her own agency in 1988. She taught workshops at the International Center of Photography in New York, Mexico, and the Center for Photography at Woodstock, and served as a Documentary Competition Juror at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival.
Notable Events and Milestones
Mark published 21 collections of her work and contributed regularly to Life, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Vanity Fair. Her collaborative work with husband Martin Bell extended beyond Streetwise to include the long-term project documenting Erin “Tiny” Blackwell, which resulted in the film Tiny: The Life of Erin Blackwell and the book Tiny: Streetwise Revisited, spanning more than 30 years. She also collaborated with Bell on the films Twins, Prom, Indian Circus, and Extraordinary Child, and served as associate producer and still photographer for the feature film American Heart (1992), directed by Bell and starring Jeff Bridges and Edward Furlong.
Awards and Honors
Mark received three Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards, three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the 2014 Lifetime Achievement in Photography Award from the George Eastman House, and the Outstanding Contribution Photography Award from the World Photography Organisation.
Additional Resources
Mary Ellen Mark’s extensive body of work and life story are documented in greater detail through Wikipedia and other biographical archives. Her published books, exhibition catalogs, and the documentary films she created with Martin Bell provide primary sources for understanding her artistic vision and impact on photojournalism and documentary photography.
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