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A fair number of photos in Mary Ellen Mark's latest show are etched indelibly in my mind. I'll pick one, to give you an idea of what Mark is all about.
Shot last year, it's of Tiny, a dark-haired woman in her mid-30s. Floating naked in her bathtub, Tiny is fat, and far from beautiful or even remarkable. If you saw her clothed and walking into a Wal-Mart, you might think, "White trash mom, needs to eat better." Tiny looks emotionally bruised as she gazes up into Mark's lens, but she's unashamed. She obviously trusts the photographer to an extraordinary degree.
GREAT CONTEXT. It isn't a great photo, except in context. We first encounter Tiny in a photo from 1983, when she was a pretty teenage street kid in Seattle. Back then, she was full of hopes of getting rich and living the good life.
By the time we reencounter her in the tub, she has had five children by five different men. Her face has hardened, her body has thickened, and her dreams have shrunk to the simple desire to find a man who will treat her well. Mark visits Tiny several times, taking some fascinating shots: her fighting (literally) with her wiry, ornery-looking mother and, again last year, in a photo with her daughter, who has inherited her sad, down-turned mouth.
These photos show the essential qualities of Mary Ellen Mark: her passion, relentless focus, and deep commitment to taking us places we otherwise never would go. If you're a reader of Business Week, Fortune, or Fast Company, you likely have seen Mark's work. She does photo essays for major magazines on the rare occasions that they commission such expensive projects.
I first encountered her photos in a piece in Business Week (Jan. 10, 1994) about the inner workings of a Connecticut hospital. To support her documentary projects, Mark also does portraits of celebrities, politicians, and other notable people for such magazines as Rolling Stone,Us, and Entertainment Weekly.
Mark's real passion, however, is documentary photos like the ones she took of Tiny. "I'm very driven by that kind of work," she says. (For a Q&A with Mark, click here.) "That's what I love, that's what I do best, that's where my heart is." She has published 11 books on subjects ranging from prostitutes in Bombay to Mother Theresa to a mental institution in Oregon. Most of her work is in black and white. If you want to check it out, you can find hundreds of her photos, and get information on buying collector's prints, at www.maryellenmark.com.
HAUNTING ODYSSEY. I also recommend perusing Mark's book American Odyssey, just released in trade paper by Aperture and in stores now for $50 or at www.aperture.org for $40. If you happen to be in northern Indiana, there's an even better way to see the American Odyssey photos: in a show at the Fort Wayne Museum of Art (www.fwmoa.org) through Nov. 5. The exhibit encompasses nearly 40 years of Mark's work and includes some haunting images.
Mark's eye for social documentary is always unsparing. She seeks out people on the edge of society who have little chance of being heard by themselves. There's another series that, like Tiny's, was taken over the course of years. It features the Damm family: a heavy-set, bearded man and his lean, tattooed wife -- both drug addicts -- their children, and their dog. We first see them in 1984, when they're living out of their car. Many of the photos are moving, like one of the father lying on a blanket with his young daughter in his arms.
Characteristically, Mark gave the Damms her phone number so they could call her collect and update her on their lives. A decade later, she shot them again, when they were living on an abandoned ranch in California. What's striking about the later photos is the ravaged faces, not just of the once-beautiful mother but of the children. One of the most shocking images is the couple's son, Jesse, dirty, in a torn sweatshirt, looking bruised and battered.
EXAGGERATED SNEER. Not all the photos are this searing. Mark loves the quirky. There are photos taken at mental institutions, rodeos, and transvestite hotels. The poster photo, which is also the cover of the book, is a 1991 study of two teenage "bullriders." For me, the image is dominated by the exaggerated sneer of the effeminate-looking bullrider on the right. If Mark's assistant hadn't clued me in, I never would have guessed this was a boy. Retired Rodeo Riders, another striking rodeo shot taken the same year, features several aged, onetime broncobusters in wheelchairs, staring gloomily at the camera.
Among the quirky images, one of my favorites, titled Yawning Dog, depicts an older man astride a Harley-Davidson motorcycle with his huge Great Dane in the sidecar beside him, yawning. Another favorite is the earliest in the show, a 1963 shot of a careworn department store Santa Claus on his coffee break, his beard pulled down so he can smoke a cigarette.
Few of Mark's celebrity photos made the show. She says she included only the ones she felt stood up as images of lasting value, apart from the fame of the person photographed. There's a wonderful, telling shot of author Henry Miller as an aged libertine in a wheelchair -- with an attractive fortyish woman hanging over his shoulders. One of the show's best photos is a 1978 shot of ventriloquist Edgar Bergen in a sunlit hallway, folding his dummy into a suitcase.
If I have a criticism of Mark's work, it's that there aren't more shots like that one, which includes enough background to show Bergen in his milieu. Many of her photos are cropped too close to the figure for my taste. This technique focuses the viewer's attention on the subject, where Mark wants it, but also strips away the context and gives the compositions a sameness that's wearisome in a large show.
Still, that's a quibble. Black-and-white documentary photography has been an endangered species since Life,Look, and other magazines specializing in this genre have died out. But through thick and thin, Mary Ellen Mark has kept at it -- to the great benefit of anyone who loves photography.
Peterson, a contributing editor at Business Week Online, offers his views on art and the business of art every week on BW Online. Follow his Moveable Feast columns Edited by Douglas Harbrecht
Copyright 2000, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
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