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Mary Ellen Mark | page 1, 2, 3
The most famous image of Tiny, one of the last that Mark took in that series, served as the cover picture for the book. Tiny is dressed in a smart sleeveless black dress, black gloves, earrings and a black pillbox hat with a mesh veil extending almost to her mouth. It's her Halloween costume for 1983 -- she's going as a French whore. Tiny's arms are crossed tightly, defensively, and her beautiful, sad face, with its eternally downturned mouth, doesn't emit happiness, or, for that matter, any light at all.
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"Tiny is somebody I care about and I've known for many years," Mark says. "It's a very different experience knowing someone and photographing their lives than it is when you just see someone [as a friend] because it's much more of an intense involvement," she says. "When you're always with them it becomes intense -- you're photographing them and watching them and they're allowing you to do this, which is a great gift that they give you." There are echoes of Tiny and the other kids of Seattle in Mark's late-'80s series on the Damm family of Los Angeles. On another assignment for Life, Mark photographed the family for a week, living in their car and at a homeless shelter in North Hollywood. Dean and Linda Damm said they were determined to make better lives for themselves and for Linda's children, Crissy and Jesse, who were 6 and 5 years old. The pictures showed an extremely hard existence that was faintly hopeful. After the piece ran, as the family set up in their own apartment, they also received help from concerned readers. But the new solidity lasted only four months; everything the Damms had was sold for drugs. Seven years later Mark visited the family again, after getting a call from them. There were two new children, Ashley, 6, and Summer, 4, and the family was living on an abandoned pig ranch in the desert north of Los Angeles. The parents have had parenting classes, attended Narcotics Anonymous and been arrested for assaulting each other. In the second Life series on the Damms, Mark's empathetic vision of the family is nevertheless harder-edged than before, and carries virtually no hint of hope. (Mark has kept in touch with Linda Damm, whose life has "taken a turn for the better," she says. "She's with a different man who's much more constructive and a positive influence in her life. She's not doing drugs anymore, and she's in a good place.") In the '90s, Mark has sharpened her eye for portraiture and at the same time found ways to expand her point of view and reveal a unique sense of humor. She still focuses on people who could be considered outside mainstream society, and they're still usually part of groups or communities that share experiences, rituals, love and pain. But the preponderance of destitution and life on the edge has given way to pictures of more or less stable people enduring the vagaries of everyday life. One magazine assignment, for instance, brought Mark to the ballroom-dancing communities of Miami and Boca Raton, where she captured senior citizens shimmying and dipping for her camera without compunction. Across the country, she examined the pageantry of the small-town rodeos of Texas. The peacock-strutting double portrait of two mini-cowboys, Craig Scarmardo and Cheyloh Mather, is heartbreaking in the way it seems to consign these boys to a life of bitter machismo. It's one of the most penetrating pictures in Mark's oeuvre. (It's on the cover of her new retrospective book, "American Odyssey," which accompanies an exhibition opening in May at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.) In another large-scale project, Mark focused on the traveling circuses of India. In gently startling images, she paints a surreal portrait of the lives of the members of 18 different circuses -- the child contortionists (or "plastic ladies") and acrobats; the dwarf clowns; and the trained and clothed bears, dogs, elephants and chimps. The atmosphere differs from that in Mark's other work. Writing in the preface to "Indian Circus" (1993), she says, "photographing the Indian circus was one of the most beautiful, joyous, and special times of my career. I was allowed to document a magic fantasy that was, at the same time, all so real. It was full of ironies, often humorous and sometimes sad, beautiful and ugly, loving and at times cruel, but always human. The Indian circus is a metaphor for everything that has always fascinated me visually." It's not as emotionally intense as "Ward 81," and it's not as full of pathos as the "Missions of Charity" series, but in "Indian Circus," Mark hit on a perfect vehicle for the full expression of her art: In equal measures, it offers clear-eyed reporting, humor, eloquent portraiture and compassion -- qualities not readily found in most photojournalism but, thanks in large part to Mark's example, increasingly apparent in good documentary photography. With her richness and insight, Mark has been considered by many to be a fine-art photographer. But she dismisses that idea: "I'm a documentary photographer. That's what I've always wanted to be; that's where my heart and soul is."
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