Mark of genius

Mary Ellen Mark was a highly influential and respected photographer during her 50-year-plus working career, which spanned from the mid-1960s till her death in 2015. She was a pioneer in the art of empathy and embedding herself with her subjects – from poverty-stricken families in the US to prostitutes in the brothels of Bombay – while never judging her subjects, purely telling their stories with her amazing photographic eye.

As a child Mark had a Box Brownie camera but she decided to study painting and art history for her initial degree. Her photographic career began in 1964 after she’d completed a Master’s degree in photojournalism at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and the following year her travels began when she went to Turkey for a year on a Fulbright Scholarship (a US cultural exchange programme). While overseas, Mark took the opportunity to also shoot in England, Germany, Greece, Italy and Spain. The resulting work ended up in her first published book, Passport, in 1974.

Though originally from Pennsylvania, Mark moved to New York after returning from Turkey and began documenting anti-Vietnam War demos, transvestite culture, the women’s liberation movement and more – it was then that the roots of her work around issues of social justice were firmly planted. Mark once revealed, ‘I feel an affinity for people who haven’t had the best breaks in society. What I want to do more than anything is to acknowledge their existence.’

This penchant for highlighting the