Mary Ellen Mark

American, 1940-2015

BiographyMary Ellen Mark (1940 -2015) was born in Philadelphia, PA where she attended the University of Pennsylvania to study painting and art history and earned her MA degree in photojournalism. Mark came of age as a photographer in the mid-to-late 1960s, often shooting on the streets of her native Philadelphia and, later, in New York at anti-Vietnam war protests and women’s rights’ movement demonstrations. Traveling extensively since her first trip to Turkey on a Fulbright Scholarship in 1965, Mark’s direct yet compassionate images of diverse people and cultures quickly gained her international acclaim through her numerous books, exhibitions and editorial magazine work. Her most celebrated photographic essays that documented the plight of the dispossessed, such as the psychiatric patients of the Oregon State hospital Ward 81 (1979), and the street prostitutes of Bombay for Falkland Road (1981) exemplify her remarkable talent to combine portraiture with insider reportage for powerful effect. Inspired by the classic, black and white documentary approach in the tradition of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Dorothea Lange and Robert Frank, Mark would spend weeks and months to gain the trust of her subjects and often maintained contact with many of them through the years.

Parallel to her career as a photojournalist, Mark also established herself as an on-set photographer for many Hollywood films, including Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) and as a fashion photographer for several advertising campaigns such as Barnes and Noble, Coach Bags, Eileen Fisher, and Patek Philippe.

Mark's photographs have appeared in Times, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair, among other magazines and in 18 books. A recipient of many grants and awards, she earned three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Photographer of the Year Award from the Friends of Photography, the World Press Award for Outstanding Body of Work Throughout the Years, the Victor Hasselblad Cover Award and two Robert F. Kennedy Awards.

Mary Ellen Mark has exhibited extensively in museums and galleries throughout the world and with a major international retrospective organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2000. Her estate is represented by Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York.

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