Exposure is a collection of
documentary photographs from the last 40 years of Mary Ellen Mark’s work.  Mark
has for her whole career been fascinated by the people at the margin’s of different
society; one of her first books was Ward 81, showing images of a locked
ward at Oregon State Mental Institution.  After she had been on assignment for
a magazine to cover the making of the movie One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest,
which was shot in an empty ward of the same institution, she and Karen Folger
Jacobs were given permission to stay interview and photograph the women on Ward
81 in 1976.  They spent over a month with the women, and the resulting book was
a rare glimpse into the treatment of mentally ill female criminals.  The ward
was closed the next year. 

Mark has worked on a series of
other projects, showing young prostitutes in India, Mother Theresa’s Missions
of Charity, street people and homeless people in the USA, an Indian circus, and
many portraits.  All the photographs from her books are available, in small
format, on her website.  Exposure provides a modest set (it is 288
pages) from her life’s work selected by Mark herself.  She provides several
pages at the end of the book of discussion of the circumstances of when she
took the pictures, and how they came to be taken.  Most of the photographs are
in black and white.  The pages are 12.7" x 10.6", and so provide much
greater detail than the small images on the Internet.  (The book is about an
inch thick, and my paperback review copy had the cover come away from the main
body of the book after I had been flipping through the pages over a number of
days.  The hardcover version should be more durable.)  Browsing through this
collection is fascinating and disturbing. 

Mark’s photographs tend to
emphasize the bizarre and unsettling parts of life.  There’s a dark humor to
some of them, and a terrible seriousness to others.  "Heroin Addict, London, Great Britain, 1969" shows a teenage boy through the window in a door, leaning
against a wall, holding a syringe into his arm.  The boy seems to be looking at
something out of the view of the camera, unconcerned that he is being
photographed.  "Roland Riley Pulling His Cat’s Whiskers, Belfast, Maine, USA, 1990," shows a rather pudgy boy with a limp and very long suffering cat
under his arm, pulling the cat’s whiskers.  The boy looks straight at the
camera, apparently showing Mark how tolerant his cat is.  In the background is
a dark and messy room.  "Twelve-Year-Old Lata Lying in Bed, Falkland Road,
Bombay, India, 1978" is in color, and shows a young girl with only a green
skirt and some jewelry on, sprawled on a dingy mattress in a tiny room just big
enough for a bed, staring up and the camera.  We see she is a prostitute, and
is presumably waiting for her next customer.  "Dancing Woman, Senior
Citizen’s Center, Miami Beach, Florida, 1979" is also in color; it shows
an older woman with blonde hair, large black round spectacles, a white and
yellow dress that comes down just below her knees, white socks, and black beach
shoes.  She is captured in motion, her hands above her head, fingers clicking,
her legs slightly parted, her weight on her left foot, and her right foot
slightly raised.  It’s the sort of position one would expect to see a little
girl in.  She stands alone, in front of a dark curtain, with a bulky old juke
box to her side. 

So Mark’s style is to catch the
attention with shocking or surprising subject matter, and then lead the viewer
think about the issues raised by the image.  Sometimes, Mark seems to verge in
participating in the exploitation of the disempowered: for example, some of the
pictures from the Indian circus feel a little as if Mark is showing us a freak
show, and some of her images of Americans make them look pathetic and
ridiculous.  The image of the "Dancing Woman" mentioned above is one
example, and "Tom Bartlett and Todd Luxton, Elvis Presley Impersonators,
Imperial Palace Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, 2004," is similarly
problematic.  Others from her Twins series will also make the viewer
feel uncomfortable, since the eerie effect depends on the fact that the oddness
of each person is doubled by the fact that they are with their twin.  Reading
her accompanying text will help to assure the viewer that Mark’s intends to be
sympathetic to her subjects.  One might interpret one’s discomfort on viewing
some of these pictures as highlighting not Mark’s exploitation of her subjects,
but rather the problematic assumptions that viewers themselves bring to
understanding what they are seeing.

It is Mark’s popular sensibility
that leads to the possibility of worries about commercialism; her work has been
featured in magazines such as Time, the New York Times Magazine,
Rolling Stone, and Vanity Fair, and her ability to find an angle and
a moment producing a gripping image makes her work very appealing, even when
the people she is photographing are in awful circumstances.  Mark’s work raises
not only ethical questions about the condition of the world, but also about how
to portray the suffering of people, and this is one of the features of her
approach that makes her so interesting. 

Links:

• Mark at Art-Dept.com http://www.art-dept.com/artists/mark/
• Author website:  http://www.maryellenmark.com/
• "Mark
  of Distinction" by Jackie McGlone, The Scotsman on Sunday, Sunday May
  22, 2005
• Andrew
  Strong, "Brilliant Careers," Salon, March 28, 2000.  

© 2006 Christian Perring. All
rights reserved.

Christian
Perring, Ph.D., is Academic Chair of the Arts & Humanities
Division and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Dowling College, Long Island. He is also editor of Metapsychology Online Reviews.  His main
research is on philosophical issues in medicine, psychiatry and psychology.

Categories: ArtAndPhotography