Preview
MARY ELLEN MARK
Friday, March 11
Canmore Collegiate Theatre
As part of Exposure 2005, the Banff-Calgary photography festival, one of the most important figures in documentary photography will be in Canmore on the evening of March 11 to speak about her work and life.
Mary Ellen Mark, known for her gritty, often soul-piercing black-and-white photographs of the disenfranchised and dispossessed is herself frequently misunderstood. Often compared with the late Diane Arbus, whose images of transvestites and dwarfs helped to bring attention to photography as a legitimate form of art, Mark’s photographs do not aim to highlight differences but to encompass the many facets of being human by showing, in her words, "an interest in people."
Mark has also been called a photojournalist, but here, too, the label doesn’t quite fit. Although she has completed photojournalism assignments for most of the major publications in the world, her work strains at the edges of the page as though the very format that contains the imagery is too restricted to do it justice.
Spending weeks, months and, in some cases, years photographing her subjects, Mark is not interested in telling a linear story. Instead, motivated to create the perfect singular image, she tries to capture the very essence of the person in front of her lens, whether it be Mother Teresa – who Mark photographed in 1979 for Life magazine and again in the late 1980s – or, more likely the case, ordinary people found in every corner of the world.
Mark’s work is, at its core, about a trust that she forms with her subjects, which is made manifest in the thousands of documentary photographs she produces.
Born in 1940, Mark attended the University of Philadelphia, where she studied painting and art history, before pursuing graduate studies in photojournalism at the Annenberg School of Communications. At the start of her career, she often worked as a still photographer for the movie industry, but her photographic interests had little to do with the fantasies created in Hollywood. Instead, they led her into the field of documentary work, where she has remained for the past four decades.
Although this is a branch of photography that, lamentably, is fading away, Mark stubbornly – some would say courageously – continues to point her camera at people that fascinate her, regardless of whether magazine editors or book publishers share her interest. Over the years her subjects have included female mental patients in Oregon’s State Hospital, Seattle street kids, the denizens of brothels in Bombay’s Falkland Road and performers in India’s travelling circuses.
No matter how exotic the subjects seem or how far removed they are from our own lives, Mark has an unparalleled ability to transcend obstacles and capture images of iconic power. She attributes her success as a documentary photographer to "spending time and being lucky," but certainly she also has a gift for making deep connections with her subjects, which results in images that are sometimes heroic, often heart-wrenching and almost always elegant.
Mary Ellen Mark will also be appearing at The Camera Store (802 - 11 Ave. S.W.) on Saturday, March 12 from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., where she will be signing copies of her most recent book. |
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