IT IS EVIDENT AFTER LOOKING at just one photograph of Mary Ellen Mark’s that so much of the beauty in her work occurred off camera as often as it appeared on film. Mark, who passed away on May 25 at the age of seventy-five, was a singular talent in her field. Photography is a deceptively difficult medium to master—good technique is nothing without empathy. In the case of Mark, who used her lens to capture everything from prostitution in Mumbai to homelessness in America to the rituals of American prom, she was not only committed to getting the shot—always stunning and sublime, often in black-and-white—but also to immersing herself in another person’s world. A mediocre photographer can sometimes behave like a tourist, skimming the surface, taking only what suits a story or a preconceived idea of a person or place. Mark always went deeper. She preferred spending months, even years with her subjects. And the commitment shows. Her photographs are luminous in their composition, brimming with raw emotion, and even though they capture just a sliver of a second—from the sway of Federico Fellini’s hips late one night on a movie set to the sweet smile on a child’s face—there is always a commanding sense of depth to her eye.
Boundaries need to exist between a journalist and her subject—how can we ever hope to tell an accurate story if we become too involved?—but an admirable trait of Mark’s was that she wasn’t afraid to cross the line if it meant doing the right thing. In 1987, on assignment for Life magazine, she spent ten days with a homeless family who had been kicked out of their shelter. The portrait, The Damm Family in Their Car, Los Angeles, California, USA, is unforgettable. They stare straight at the camera, solemn and fierce. Dean, the father, has his arms wrapped around his wife, Linda. There is a brutish expression on his face; Linda leans against him. She looks young but empty, slightly haggard. Her two children from a previous marriage sit in the backseat, Crissy’s hand gently touching Jesse’s cheek. We have only each other, the gesture implies. In 1994, Life decided to run a follow-up on the family. After spending months tracking the Damms down, Mark found them squatting in an abandoned ranch house in Los Angeles. The parents, who had always abused drugs, were still using—when the first portfolio was published, Life’s readers had sent the Damms money, a temporary solution to a much thornier problem. None of the children were in school. When Mark arrived that morning, she found the family asleep in bed. “Crissy just looked blank but somehow embarrassed at the same time,” Mark recalled in an interview with the Telegraph’s Richard Grant in March 2005. “I didn’t know what to do so I lifted up the camera and took a photograph, natural light with a little bounce flash. Dean got really angry when he saw the photograph because his marijuana pipe was on the dresser. But look at Crissy’s face. I was sure he was sexually abusing her. I asked her about it and she denied it and denied it, and finally admitted that he had been.” Mark’s work was attached to an unavoidable sense of duty—it was a sentiment that the best of her photographs are able to evoke effortlessly. As she said once, “I did this story to help these children and others like them.”
Mark mourned the changing landscape of documentary photography, observing how the work she published when she was younger, which helped make her career, became increasingly more and more difficult to do. “It’s sad because this is the kind of work I love to do, more than anything else in the world,” she said in the same interview with Grant. “And I was very successful doing it for a long time, and now I can’t make a living doing it. The market has dried up. Magazines don’t want serious documentary photography any more. They want style, fashion, celebrity, surface gloss, or an illustration to sell an idea or a story to the reader. I’m not an illustrator and I refuse to take shallow, glitzy pictures so I’m . . . not a success any more.”
Mark transitioned to fashion and celebrity portraiture later in her career—her photographs in Vogue are exquisite and strange, rare for such a glossy magazine. Her portrait of Agnes Martin in Vogue’s November 1992 issue reveals a kind of control and stoicism that one can find in the artist’s abstract paintings. How long did it take Mark to find it in Martin’s face? Mark also had the privilege of being a longtime staff photographer for the New Yorker.
But she was right, in a way. The appetite for her kind of work has changed. Mark was irreplaceable, and our loss of her is deeply felt. As Francis Ford Coppola wrote about Mark, after hiring her to be the on-set photographer for his films: “One of my pleasures during the making of Apocalypse Now was to watch Mary Ellen Mark, dressed in army fatigues, sloshing around in the mud shooting pictures. That striking black hair, those lovely eyes (often behind a camera), that smile—yes, her pictures were always unusual and beautiful, but so was she.”
Thessaly La Force is a writer and editor based in New York City.
