Mary Ellen Mark took photographs as a child
Mary Ellen Mark was born in Philadelphia on 20 March 1940. She began taking photographs at the age of nine with her first camera, a small Kodak Brownie, and showed a talent for painting and drawing as a pupil at Cheltenham High School, and was also a cheerleader. After four years of study, she received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in art and art history from the University of Pennsylvania in 1962. After working for a short time in the municipal administration of Pennsylvania, she began studies in photojournalism at the Annenberg School for Communication, graduating with a Master's degree in 1964. With the help of a Fulbright scholarship, Mary Ellen Mark travelled to Turkey for a year and portrayed the people living there in her characteristically sharp-eyed and empathetic black and white images. From Turkey, she travelled on to Greece, Italy, Spain, England and Germany, and the resulting photographs were published in 1974 in her first photo book Passport.
An empathetic eye for social outsiders
At the end of the 1960s, Mary Ellen Mark moved to New York, where she documented numerous political movements with her camera, including the protest marches against the Vietnam War and the demonstrations for women's rights. During this time, the photographer developed a keen sense for groups outside the mainstream of society. She ventured into the troubled, tense periphery, photographed the outsiders of society, the marginalised minorities, and gave a voice to those who would otherwise not be heard. In doing so, she showed great empathy and took great care to preserve the dignity of those she photographed. She worked with Mother Teresa (1910-1997) for her photo book on prostitutes in India, and spent three months getting to know the prostitutes and building up a relationship of trust. She also frequently photographed children, whom she deliberately did not regard as children, but simply as little people. Another important theme for Mary Ellen Mark was psychological illness, documenting with subtle images the effects it had on those affected.
Mark also photographed the glittering film world
As well as the miserable and the poor, Mary Ellen Mark photographed the rich and beautiful: her portraits of celebrities appeared in magazines such as Vanity Fair, Time, Life, Vogue and Rolling Stone. In 1969, Look magazine published her photo reportage on the Italian director Federico Fellini (1920-1993) during the filming of his ambitious, lavishly decorated Petronius adaptation Satyricon. As a production photographer, she accompanied the making of over 100 films, including such celebrated masterpieces as Alice's Restaurant (1970) by Arthur Penn (1922-2019), Apocalypse Now (1979) by Francis Ford Coppola (b. 1939) and Australia (2008) by Baz Luhrmann (b. 1962). Mary Ellen Mark received an almost incalculable number of prizes and awards for her extensive photographic work, including the 1994 German Photographic Society Award named after the German photojournalist Erich Salomon.
Mary Ellen Mark died in New York on 25 May 2015.
Mary Ellen Mark - Works that have already been sold at Kunsthaus Lempertz:
