A Three-Volume Book Becomes a Testament to Mary Ellen Mark’s Career
“Mary Ellen would never have made this book,” Martin Bell, Mary Ellen Mark’s husband and collaborator of more than thirty years, writes in an essay accompanying The Book of Everything, the three-volume collection of the photographer’s life’s work recently published by Steidl.
15 Photographers on How Imagination Shapes Their Work
From the Magnum Square Print Sale in Partnership with Aperture, Dawoud Bey, Nan Goldin, KangHee Kim and more reflect on the photograph’s potential to influence social and artistic images.
We’ve reached out to Datta for comment but have yet to hear back. It appears that his website, Facebook and Twitter were all taken down after our requests
Mary Ellen Mark often photographed individuals who, despite being on the fringes of society, projected an unusual degree of self-confidence. They had strong personalities, with a clear sense of self.
The beloved photographer’s final Oaxaca Workshop wasn’t picture-perfect, but the parting photobook it produced outshines, and will outlast, bad memories
Yes, she was a diva, but she earned every bit of it. Just spend some time with her work. Deep, brilliant, and everlasting.
“There is no demand for reality anymore”. – Mary Ellen Mark, April 27, 2015
Melissa Harris, the editor in chief at Aperture, who edited two books with Ms. Mark and was a close friend, described her as “a force of nature” who pushed herself despite her illness. She described Ms. Mark as someone who cared deeply about people and calling attention to injustice. That meant going back often to her subjects, in order to delve deeply into their lives, relying on that connection to give her work a humane touch.
Her love extended to the people she worked with: to her staff, her subjects, her students, and the other photographers in her life. Loyalty was one of her essential qualities. Once she embraced a person, that person became a part of her life
The American photographer produced some of the most “delicately shaded studies of vulnerability ever set on film”
Those in the Leica circle are no stranger to the name Mary Ellen Mark (link is external). It is with great sadness that we must inform our readers that she has passed… She was 75. Time has an article entitled, “In Memoriam: Mary Ellen Mark (1940 – 2015)” (link is external) that’s worth a read. She was an avid Leica shooter, owning four Leica cameras – two M4-2s, one M4-P and one M-6 along with five Leitz lenses. She was featured on the Leica blog (link is external) several times and even held appearances (link is external) and workshops (link is external) at Leica stores.
Like the rest of the photography community, I’m very saddened to hear of her death today. I didn’t know her personally, but she has always been one of my favorite photographers. And her kindness and complete lack of pretension is something that has always stuck with me and something that I will always remember when I look at her work. RIP MEM.
Mary Ellen Mark, 75, died yesterday, on Memorial Day, as confirmed today by a family representative.
Needless to say, the world of photography has just lost one of its biggest stars.
Mary Ellen Mark talks to Alison Stieven-Taylor
“Magazines are not interested in work that is very personal. They want work that can be changed with a grey or blue filter in post-production. If young photographers are interested in what I was, in telling stories, they have to pursue that. Don’t let technology push you around”.
Why is it that some photographers take to the studio, while others take to the street? Is street photography photojournalism, art — or both? These are some of the questions raised by Everybody Street, a new documentary chronicling the life and work of 13 of New York’s most renowned street photographers, including Joel Meyerowitz, Bruce Gilden, Mary Ellen Mark, Elliot Erwitt, Jeff Mermelstein, Boogie and Martha Cooper
I think what photography can do is open up all sorts of lives for people — worlds that people couldn’t understand. Some of the very dramatic pictures people have done, particularly of wars, the Vietnam war especially (because access was better), made people aware of how horrible it was – for example, the photograph that Eddie Adams took of General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Viet Cong prisoner or the photograph that Nick Ut took of the burned child running down the street — it’s very important to make people aware of what’s going on in the world.
For those who don’t know Mary Ellen Mark personally, the notion of one of the world’s premier documentary photographers hosting a Christmas party for dogs might sound downright weird. But for the past decade, Mark has opened the doors of her New York City studio to throngs of canines.
Mary Ellen Mark is a renowned, award-winning photographer. Her work has spanned over 40 years with exhibits all over the world including “Leica: My First Camera” that premiered at the opening of Leica Store and Gallery Los Angeles in June 2013 and is now on display at Leica Store Washington DC.
“I don’t relax,” Mark has said. “I can’t take vacations. I’m obsessive-compulsive and I worry with every project that I’m going to fail. When it starts to go well, and I sense that something beautiful and important and meaningful is being created, it’s a fantastic feeling and I find it very hard to stop.”
