Early on, Mark also achieved success as a photo-
grapher for the film industry, a lucrative career
direction that helped subsidize her social documen-
tary projects. She shot production stills for dozens
of films, includingAlice’s Restaurant, The Day of the
Locust, Apocalypse Now, Ragtime, One Flew Over
the Cuckoo’s Nest,andSilkwood. The film stills
brought her notice and assignments from maga-
zines, including a 1969 commission fromLookto
create a photo-essay on Federico Fellini directing
the filmFellini Satyricon, which Mark considers
her breakthrough story in photojournalism.
Constantly curious about the vagaries of human
experience, Mark specializes in social documentation
and portraiture, working mainly in black and white.
While some of her editorial work has involved por-
traits of celebrities, including film stars and directors,
writers, artists, and musicians, more often Mark has
photographed those she calls the ‘‘unfamous,’’ mean-
ing people outside the mainstream whose lives are
not conventionally newsworthy. She is drawn parti-
cularly to outcasts whose lives play out within a
troubled situation that isolates them, such as pov-
erty, illness, or addiction; and to people who live in
social groups that function like a substitute family,
such as performers in an itinerant circus or the inha-
bitants of a brothel. The diversity of her topics
reflects both the assignments offered to her and her
personal interest in certain topics; she manages to
fund personal projects through a variety of means,
including grants, financial support from non-profit
organizations, and selling her ideas to magazines and
other commercial outlets.
Mark’s preferred method is to proceed with a
project by immersing herself over an extended per-
iod in the world of her subjects, developing a rela-
tionship with her subjects and learning to see
nuances in the conditions of their environment.
To cite several examples: Mark and the writer
Karen Folger Jacobs lived for 36 days in a women’s
maximum security unit in a mental institution in
Oregon, resulting in the bookWard 81 (1979);
Mark spent several months on two separate trips
to India in 1980 and 1981 photographing Mother
Teresa and her Missions of Charity in Calcutta for
aLifemagazine assignment and subsequent book;
and she traveled with 16 different circuses during
two three-month trips to India to produce the book
Indian Circus(1993). Sometimes Mark will stay in
touch with people long after a project is finished.
For example, she has returned to Seattle repeatedly
to photograph Erin Blackwell, or ‘‘Tiny,’’ who was
14 when Mark first photographed her in 1983 for a
photo-essay for Life, including the often repro-
duced image,‘‘Tiny’’ in Her Halloween Costume,
Seattle, Washington, USA.The latter assignment
led to the Academy Award nominated filmStreet-
wise(1985), directed and photographed by Mark’s
husband, the filmmaker Martin Bell, and to Mark’s
1988 book of the same title.
In her photo-essays, Mark is more interested in
revealing individual personalities set within their
sociological context than in telling a conventional
narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. Pre-
cedents for her work include the work of photo-
journalists Margaret Bourke-White, Dorothea
Lange, and W. Eugene Smith. Mark is interested
in exploring the emotional and psychological tenor
of small societies, and makes no pretense to objec-
tivity. AboutWard 81, Mark observed, ‘‘I just
wanted to do photographs that I believed in with-
out having any rhyme or reason or theory, or hav-
ing to spell out a sort of storytelling. I wanted to
show their personalities—that was the thing that
drew me to them’’ (Fulton, 11–12). More generally
about her intentions for her work, Mark stated, ‘‘I
think each photographer has a point of view and a
way of looking at the world...that has to do with
your subject matter and how you choose to present
it. What’s interesting is letting people tell you about
themselves in the picture’’ (Fulton, 27).
Mark wants each of her images, including
those that are part of a photo-essay, to be able
to stand alone as a single image, to sum up and
provide insight into the personality and life of a
particular subject. A hallmark of Mark’s style is
that her subjects are aware of the camera and
make eye contact, projecting themselves into the
lens. This intimacy reflects Mark’s capacity to
engage her subjects on a personal level; the
approach also involves viewers, since the subjects
appear to be gazing directly at them. Mark favors
black-and-white over color photography, but
occasionally shoots in color, including the images
made for her bookFalkland Road: Prostitutes of
Bombay(1981), which show prostitutes in Bom-
bay situated in the colorfully patterned interior
rooms of brothels. Although Mark demands high
technical quality in her prints, she does not
undertake her own darkroom work. She mostly
uses small, handheld 35 mm cameras, and likes to
work close to her subjects with short lenses. She
also has shot with medium-format and 45-inch
view cameras. She used the large 2024 inch
Polaroid camera for her study of twins, shot over
several years at the annual Twins Days Festival
in Twinsburg, Ohio, and published in the book
Twins(2003).
JeanRobertsonMARK, MARY ELLEN