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. Mary Ellen knew they were for Hollywood and she could have just made what people wanted, but she was committed to the truth, and she brought that truth home time after time. She was uncompromising. I heard Mary Ellen tell that story sometime in the ’80s. I was in undergrad and for $5 you could go and see speakers. I didn’t even know who she was—I didn’t know anything about anything then, I think I’d just made my way to AA—but I looked at her photos and, you know, I saw what you could do! I guess what I love about that story is that my whole life I’d been told, “Don’t talk so loud! Tone it down an octave! Reign it in!” So seeing that somebody like Mary Ellen—who definitely didn’t do that, and in fact made a lifedoing that—became an icon, and knowing that every woman photographer’s career during that age is fashioned after her in some way or another, is just incredible. 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. A Guggenheim Fellow and Pulitzer Prize nominee, her work has appeared in theBrooke and Billy at Gibbs Senior High School prom. St. Petersburg, Florida, 1986I’ve only been working professionally for about five years, and I saw Mary Ellen Mark’s work for the first time—it was in a bookstore in Manhattan—about three years ago. Maybe that’s kind of late, but for me, being self-taught, I always feel like I’m trying to catch up and learn about all of these different legacies, especially those of women. 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. There’s something meditative about some of her pictures, a layer of gentleness, and I often attribute that to women photographers. 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.is a lens-based artist and documentarian. She is a 2019 Magnum Foundation Photography and Social Justice Fellow; her work has appeared in
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