Salon.com > Andrew Long

Mary Ellen Mark

Tue, 28 Mar 2000 17:00:00 +0000

In 1965, at the outset of her career, what documentary photographer Mary Ellen Mark wanted to do more than anything was get away: journey to distant countries, travel to unfamiliar places in America, explore and try to understand the lives of as many different kinds of people as she could. That she's put together a world-class body of work on just those initial terms is a testament to her fortitude and self-assurance, and also to her ability to connect, quickly and deeply, with her subjects.

Mark has continued to elevate her goals, to the point where her strikingly diverse photographic series -- of homeless families, runaway children, mentally ill patients, Indian prostitutes -- are all bound together by a generosity of vision. In its social aspect, her work has become synonymous with how important it is to acknowledge the humanity of those people on the edges of society, and often at the edges of their own lives.

Thirty-five years ago, Mark's aims were simple. "I wanted to travel from the beginning," she has said. "As a kid, I used to dream about airplanes, before I ever flew in one. I really knew when I started photographing I wanted it to be a way of knowing different cultures, not just in other countries but in this country, too, and I knew I wanted to be a voyeur."

Earth, moon and stars

Fri, 12 Nov 1999 17:00:00 +0000

One of the more worthwhile aspects of millennium madness may be the resurfacing of an urge to set aside the mean concerns of everyday life and reflect on who we are, what we are and what on earth -- and away from it, for that matter -- it all means. Three recent books of photography go surprisingly deep in exploring the awe-inspiring sights of our terrestrial, lunar and celestial surroundings.

Although images from National Geographic, CNN and the Discovery Channel can at times make our planet seem all too familiar, the Earth is still a source of wonder -- something that "Earth From Above," a new coffee-table book by French aerial photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand, makes clear.

At 416 pages and eight pounds, this encyclopedic compendium doesn't seem to leave much out. With a team of more than two dozen assistants, Arthus-Bertrand completed a five-year project in which he flew in airplanes and helicopters over 75 countries, photographing geological formations, rural settlements, desert dwellers, sinuous coastlines, urban metropolises and much more. Most of the 195 photographs span two full pages, and thanks to an extensive legend system, each one has an informative thumbnail caption describing locations, histories and other pertinent information.

“Walker Evans”

Wed, 11 Aug 1999 16:00:00 +0000

In 1927, a decade before Walker Evans would be acknowledged as one of the preeminent American photographers of the young century, the 23-year-old college dropout was infatuated with French symbolist poetry and sensualist prose. Andri Gide's style, in particular, he found "mesmerizing," and that year he translated a 12-page section of
"Si le grain ne meurt," Gide's scandalous confessional memoir. One relatively innocuous passage recalled a childhood epiphany: "It seems to me that I am about to be initiated suddenly into another life, a mysterious unusually real, a more brilliant and a more pathetic life, which commences only when little children are in bed." Just after Evans' translation stops, Gide pushes on toward deeper waters: "There is reality and there are dreams and there is another reality as well."

Both passages bear startling affinities to Evans' future. Over the next three years he did start a new life, as a Manhattan bohemian, cultivating friendships with other young artists, writers and intellectuals and dwelling more and more on photography, an art that until then he had considered a kind of "left-hand hobby." In 1930, he set up a studio in Brooklyn Heights and embarked on a career of making pictures that were immediately recognized for their astonishing ability to capture the other reality that neither dreams nor everyday life was equipped to describe.