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Throughout her legendary 50-year career, photographer Mary Ellen Mark made the kind of pictures that stung the heart and surprised the eye. Shooting for magazines like Vogue, Life, and Rolling Stone, she documented people on the outskirts of society—sex workers, street kids, cross-dressing beauty pageant contestants, patients in a women’s psychiatric ward—creating memorable images that managed to be gritty, deeply empathetic, and, always, beautiful.
When she died in 2015, at 75, Mark left behind not only a towering body of work but also an approach that photographers will be unpacking for decades to come. They’ll get plenty of help from a radiant new three-volume box set, The Book of Everything (Steidl), one of the most extraordinary photo books of the year. With more than 600 of Mark’s pictures (not to mention recollections from people she shot, passages of her writings, and interview excerpts), the book definitively chronicles her life’s work, filling in information behind the frames of both her iconic and seldom-seen pictures. But over the course of its 880 pages, the book offers something else: a pin-sharp picture of a pioneer, as passionate as she was uncompromising, who left a fearsome legacy.
Vogue spoke with three celebrated photographers about a favorite Mary Ellen Mark image and what her work means to them.
“She could make you care about people”
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve looked at this picture. When I first saw it in Life magazine, I stared at it for the longest time. I studied every inch. It was taken for a story about homeless families and it shows how much Mary Ellen cared about these people, that she wanted us to see that, even though they were living in their car, they were still together, still a family, that they cared about each other, that where they lived didn’t define them.
She was a role model for me and, I think, for a lot of women. She was intrepid and believed what she was doing was important. I think she taught us, if we paid attention, to be fearless and to believe in ourselves. She made us braver and more confident. She did not take no for an answer, and that, also, was a very good lesson. I remember saying to myself, Wow, she got that picture because she didn’t give up. I learned that from her.
She wouldn’t take shit from anybody, excuse my language. And, you know, sometimes she was the queen, like if she didn’t want to have to rent a car and drive herself, [the client] would have to pay for a driver or an assistant. And that was okay because, first and foremost, she was concerned with the people in her pictures—like the family living in their car.
She could make you care about people. And I wanted to do that, too. I thought that was a great way to live your photographic life. I love her so much, even now, just talking about her.
—Maggie Steber, the former director of photography at the Miami Herald, is a documentary photographer who has shot in over 70 countries for National Geographic and the New York Times Magazine, among others. In 2019, she was a Pulitzer Prize finalist.
“She was uncompromising”
This 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] Looking for Mr. Goodbar. 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 life not doing 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 it is a burden to be a truth-teller—is remarkable. You look at these photos and your mouth can’t close.
—Brenda Ann Kenneally is a digital folk artist and documentary photographer. A Guggenheim Fellow and Pulitzer Prize nominee, her work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, and Life.
“There’s something meditative about some of her pictures”
I’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 timing is important. 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.
—Arlene Mejorado is a lens-based artist and documentarian. She is a 2019 Magnum Foundation Photography and Social Justice Fellow; her work has appeared in Vogue, The Nation, and The California Sunday Magazine.
