Mark, Mary Ellen (b. 1940), American photographer. Born in Philadelphia and educated at the University of Pennsylvania and the Annenberg School of Communications, she realized early on that photographing people was to be her life. From 1965 to 1966 she was a Fulbright Scholar in Turkey and over the years has received assignments from Life, Ms, Paris-Match, and other news and photography magazines. Like W. Eugene Smith, whose work she admired, Mark has always displayed a strong independence as a social documentary photographer and is renowned for the intense concentration she brings to her projects. For Ward 81 (1979), for example, she lived in a ward at the Oregon State Mental Hospital for months in order to develop a rapport with staff and patients. Mark's many projects have included photographic essays on drug addicts in England, homeless youth in Seattle, the lives of women in Northern Ireland, Mother Teresa's work with the dying in Calcutta, prostitutes in Bombay, and itinerant street performers throughout India, a country to which she has repeatedly returned. Her books include Passport (1974), Falkland Road (1981), Streetwise (1985), Mother Teresa: Her Missions in Calcutta (1985), and American Odyssey, 1963-1999 (2000).
— Tim Troy
Bibliography
- Fulton, M., Mary Ellen Mark: 25 Years (1991)
The Oxford Companion to the Photograph. Copyright © 2005 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
