Throughout her legendary 50-year career, photographer Mary Ellen Mark made the kind of pictures that stung the heart and surprised the eye.
Women’s Bar. Upper East Side, New York City, 1977This is not Mary Ellen Mark’s most famous photo, but for me it sort of encapsulates everything. In the ’70s, she was hired by a big movie producer to take a series of pictures in bars [to promote the film]. But the producer felt the pictures were too harsh, too real—and he didn’t use them.
I heard Mary Ellen tell that story sometime in the ’80s. I was in undergrad and for $5 you could go and see speakers.
Mary Ellen didn’t come from a hardscrabble life. She came from some means and privilege, and everyone knows she went to [University of Pennsylvania] with Candice Bergen, so she had some choice. And given that, to be a woman, and to carve out a life in this thing called photography, with all of the energy that that required—because ita burden to be a truth-teller—is remarkable. You look at these photos and your mouth can’t close.is a digital folk artist and documentary photographer.
What stood out for me was the way she composed her images. I gravitate to her more subtle work, like this picture of the prom. I like that in the midst of a huge event, she found this very intimate moment and created a quietness around it. I’m imagining that she’s not rushing through the moment; she’s kind of letting it unfold. There’s a lot of emphasis put on the timing of a photograph, and timingimportant. But sometimes the connection to the people in the picture is more important.
Women of Mary Ellen Mark’s generation had to have a certain presence, you know, a sense of authority in the moment in order to get things done. They established that women can do this work; now, hopefully, we’re able to walk into a room and not be questioned about who’s in charge. We’re able to be ourselves without having to overcompensate—meaning we can have that kind of strong personality or not, but still be respected either way. Thank God for those women.
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