Fringe reality

Different strokes

“I’m just interested in people on the edges. I feel an affinity for people who haven’t had the best breaks in society.” Those simple words seemed to sum up the entire approach to life and art of Mary Ellen, who passed away on May 25, 2015, aged 75.

The veteran photographer who entrenched herself in the practice of social documentary left behind a vast repertoire of sensitive images that laid bare the lives of many dispossessed, deprived and marginalised people. With an uncanny talent to sneak into the underbelly of diverse cultures, Mark found her subjects in the lowest depths of humanity.

Teenage heroin addicts in London; youthful dropouts in Paris; mentally ill patients in the Oregon State Hospital; child hustlers on the streets of Seattle; and prostitutes in Bombay’s Falkland Road — she could reach them all and capture the most intimate moments of their severely disturbed and disjointed lives.

For Mark, people on the social fringes were the prime reason for choosing photography. “I’m interested in people who haven’t had all the lucky breaks in life — people who are handicapped emotionally, physically or financially. They touch me. I do a lot of other work to support myself, but those kinds of projects are the reasons I became a photographer.”

Breaking the ice
Whatever the final outcome, Mark realised that the initial contact with the subject was always hard and critical. “It’s like jumping into cold water.” But she also believed that if the photographer was alert and aware, the subjects do “send signals and you have to know how far you can push in any given situation.”

At the same time, she warned that making documentaries could affect the photographer psychologically. “You feel a tremendous amount of guilt because you’ve taken something from the subjects. They’ve given you something great, and how can you ever repay them?”
Mark, who graduated in Painting and Art History from the University of Pennsylvania in 1962, gave up painting altogether and surrendered to the art of photography. “I just knew from the minute I picked up a camera that I wanted to photograph people and do social documentary photographs. No one could understand my passion for photography. It came out of the blue.”

In a career spanning 45 years, she travelled across continents shooting memorable pictures that featured in important magazines including LIFE, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Esquire and Vanity Fair. Her remarkable body of documentary and photojournalistic work got her many honours including a string of honorary doctorates and the 2014 Lifetime Achievement in Photography Award from the George Eastman House.

Mark, who stuck to analog photography all her life, published 18 highly acclaimed books on human interest themes. Her pictures were featured in international exhibits. Her photo essay on runaway children in Seattle inspired an Academy Award-nominated film, Streetwise, directed by her husband, Martin Bell. In 1976, when she captured the inner portals of the women’s maximum security ward of a mental asylum, renowned art critic Robert Hughes called the work as “one of the most delicately shaded studies of vulnerability ever set on film.”

Besides path-breaking work in photojournalism, Mark was involved in advertising campaigns for Hasselblad, Heineken, Nissan and other brands. She was also a unit photographer on acclaimed films including American Heart, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Apocalypse Now.

Mark was concerned about the gradual decline of human interest stories in the media. “Magazines have gotten much more conservative,” she said in an interview with Janis Bultman (Darkroom Photography/ 1987). “In-depth stories take time and they’re expensive. Sometimes the pictures are harder to look at. Most magazines seem to want simple solutions — pictures that are easy to look at and don’t pose any questions. I like portraits that tell me something about the person being photographed, not how clever the photographer is because he got someone to jump in the air or stand on his head.”

Love for India

Mark began shooting India way back in the 1960s and developed a deep affiliation towards the country. Her photo-essay Mother Teresa in Calcutta, published in Life Magazine, won her, among others, Robert F Kennedy Journalism Award.

She would recall how in the initial stages of the Mumbai’s sex workers project (which culminated in a book titled Falkland Road), people had cursed, thrown things at her and even hit her in the face. Over time, however, she was able to sit and drink tea in Olympia Cafe with street prostitutes, have beer with a transvestite madam and enter the inner rooms of the brothels. “One night while I was there the police came into the house and arrested several girls for soliciting in the hallways. The madams went out to bargain with them, and one Nepalese madam hid me under her bed until it was all over. I felt very safe under her bed: safe and protected and accepted.”

She also wrote touchingly how saying goodbye to them was heartbreaking. She was hugged by many; while others cried, shook hands and waved farewell from the windows. “One last tea at the Olympia Cafe... I started to cry. ‘You shouldn’t weep,’ said (prostitute) Asha. ‘You should say goodbye with your head up and proud and then leave.’ She walked me out into the street to find a taxi.”

Mark was equally enamoured picturing animals and their caregivers in Indian circus tents and outside. “I could spend my whole life photographing circuses,” she would say. “They combine everything I’m interested in — they’re ironic, poetic and corny at the same time. There’s also something about a circus that’s magical, sentimental and almost tragic, like a Fellini film.”

Mark herself was a great lover of animals. Her most recent book, Man and Beast: Photographs from Mexico and India (2014), examined the complex relationship between the animal and human species. It was also a product of her perennial fascination with “the anthropomorphic quality of animals, and the animalistic quality of man.”