Remembering Mary Ellen Mark
Philadelphia-born humanist photographer, Mary Ellen Mark, died at the age of 75 on Monday, May 25, 2015.
Mark’s work had been widely published in LIFE, the New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and Vanity Fair. During her career, she traveled extensively “to make pictures that reflect a high degree of humanism.”
Throughout her career, she produced 18 books and was working on her 19th for Aperture. That final project was focused on Tiny, a young prostitute from Seattle whom she had photographed in Streetwise, her much admired essay published in 1988. Her photographs from Seattle also became the basis of the academy award nominated film, also named Streetwise, directed and photographed by her husband, Martin Bell.
-
- A little boy creates his own fantasy game amid his junky surroundings, in this photograph by Mary Ellen Mark, “Paddy Joyce. Travelers Encampment at Funglas, Ireland, 1991.” (AP Photo/Kreisberg Group Ltd. /Mary Ellen Mark)
-
- Stacy Spivey and her baby brother, McKee, Kentucky, 1990. (Mary Ellen Mark)
-
- Tiny in her Halloween Costume, Seattle, 1983. (Mary Ellen Mark)
-
- Central Park, New York City, 1967. (Mary Ellen Mark)
In a 2008 interview with The Philadelphia Inquirer, Mark talked about her “side job” working on movie sets, shooting the stars.
“For me, working on a film, it’s like photographing paintings in a museum,” Mark explains. “You’re basically entering somebody else’s world and photographing their world. It’s nothing that you’ve actually, on your own, seen and created.”
In 2014, she received the 2014 Lifetime Achievement in Photography Award from the George Eastman House as well as the Outstanding Contribution Photography Award from the World Photography Organization.
Baltimore neighborhoods
Baltimore street photographers
Year in review
Freddie Gray: protests, aftermath
24 hours with...
A. Aubrey Bodine
Viewing Baltimore from above