Photography and Cinema

example, the documentarist Mary Ellen Mark was assigned a photo story

on the making ofOne Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest(Milos Forman, 1975 ).

The film was being made on location in a men’s psychiatric ward in

Oregon State hospital. While she was there Mark met women patients on

the high-security ward. She returned after the shoot to document their

daily lives, eventually publishing the results as the bookWard 81.^4 More

recently, Mike Mills’sThumbsucker( 2004 ) was covered by Mark Borthwick,

Todd Cole, Takashi Homma, Ryan McGinley and Ed Templeton, who all

move fluidly between editorial commissions and art. Alejandro Gonzáles

Iñárritu’sBabel( 2006 ) was documented by Mary Ellen Mark, Patrick

Bard, Graciela Iturbide and Miguel Rio Branco. Lynne Ramsay, a photo-

grapher herself, asked Gautier Deblonde to shoot the making of her film

Morvern Callar( 2002 ). In these instances the photographers were chosen

on the basis of an affinity between their style and those of the filmmakers,

but all were encouraged to shoot in their own way rather than mimic the

look of the films.^5

The most celebrated case of independent photographers working on

set is the extensive coverage of John Huston’sThe Misfits( 1961 ) by nine

Magnum agency photojournalists, including Eve Arnold, Henri Cartier-

Bresson, Elliott Erwitt and Inge Morath.^6 At the time their images were

effective publicity.^7 In the decades since their function has changed.

The Misfitshad an unusually troubled shoot and turned out to be the last

completed film for two of its stars, Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe.

The on-screen story and the film’s production were both dominated by

strained relationships and emotional turmoil, and over time the two

have become inseparable in the popular imagination. Many of the photo-

graphs, particularly of the fragile Monroe, work equally as film stills and

reportage since we cannot tell if she is in or out of character.

By contrast, an unlikely experiment with photographers on a later

John Huston film has almost been forgotten. For the production of the

Depression-era musicalAnnie( 1982 ), ‘the best young photographers’

were invited by the producer to shoot ‘whatever they want on set’.^8

Again there were nine, including William Eggleston, Garry Winogrand,

Stephen Shore, Joel Meyerowitz and Mitch Epstein, all art photographers

124 working broadly within the documentary style. The resulting folios were