Mary Ellen Mark obituary

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/may/27/mary-ellen-mark

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Mary Ellen Mark, who has died aged 75 after suffering from myelodysplastic syndrome, a disease that affects bone marrow and blood, was one of the great documentary photographers of recent times. “I think photography is closest to writing, not painting,” she once said, “because you are using this machine to convey an idea.”

Her ideas tended towards the humanistic and her most celebrated work documented the plight of the dispossessed, whether psychiatric patients of the Oregon State hospital for her classic book Ward 81 (1979), or the street prostitutes of Bombay, for Falkland Road (1981). Her work was published in Life, the New York Times, Vanity Fair, the New Yorker and Rolling Stone and in 18 books, which often drew on her magazine and newspaper projects.

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. She spoke later of the joy she found the first time she went out on the streets with a camera: “I just took a walk and started making contact with people and photographing them, and I thought: ‘I love this. This is what I want to do for ever.’”

Mark was born in Philadelphia and grew up in suburban Elkin Park, attending Cheltenham high school, where she became head cheerleader and excelled at painting and drawing. She studied for a degree in painting and art history at the University of Pennsylvania and gained an MA in photojournalism there in 1964. Her postgraduate work earned her a Fulbright scholarship, which funded a trip to Turkey the following year.

Her first serious assignment came from Look magazine, which sent her to London to shoot young heroin addicts. Her unflinching portraits of teenage junkies shooting up in the “fixing room” of St Clement’s hospital drug unit merged portraiture and insider reportage to powerful effect – one smiling girl cuddles a pet puppy with one hand while a syringe dangles from her other arm – and announced what was to come.

Mark was not a believer in detached photojournalism. For Ward 81, she lived for 36 days with the patients in Oregon State hospital and, for Falkland Road, she spent three months befriending and photographing the prostitutes who worked on a single long street in Bombay. She had, she said when the book was published, been thinking of Falkland Road for 10 years since her first trip to India in 1968. She tried to find a way into her subject several times, but was met with hostility and aggression, on one occasion being punched in the face by a drunken man.

In 1978, she returned even more determined. “It was the same as always – crowds of men around me and the women alternately hurling insults and garbage at me,” she wrote, “… as the days passed and people saw my persistence, they began to get curious. Some of the women thought I was crazy, but a few were surprised by my interest in and acceptance of them. And slowly, very slowly, I began to make friends.”

Related: Mary Ellen Mark's legendary photographs – in pictures

Making friends with her subjects was an essential part of Mark’s approach and it showed in her images. Using rich colours, she portrayed the street girls of Bombay (now Mumbai) in all their exoticism and ennui, as well as the often cramped and dirty spaces they were forced to work in. Her images were never vicarious or salacious, but always shot through with a sense of her own humanity.

She returned to India to shoot travelling circuses, but the inequalities of America increasingly drew her attention. In 1983, Life commissioned Mark to chronicle the precarious loves of Seattle’s teenage prostitutes, pimps, drug dealers and small-time drug pushers. Alongside her husband, Martin Bell, she made the documentary Streetwise and later published a book of the same name. In 1996, she chronicled the lives of homeless children trying to reconnect with their families while living in shelters run by the charity H.E.L.P.

Parallel to her career as a photojournalist, Mark also established herself as an on-set photographer for many Hollywood films. She had been initially dispatched to Rome by Look magazine in 1969 to shoot Federico Fellini as he was making Satyricon and, over the years, photographed the making of more than 100 movies, including Mike Nichols’s Catch-22 (1969), Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) and Baz Luhrmann’s epic Australia (2008).

From 1998, when she first photographed the annual Twins Day festival in Twinsburg, Ohio, her work became both more formal and more ambitious, but she still saw it as essentially documentary. In 2001 and 2002, she returned to the festival, each time with a crew of 12 assistants, a huge 20x24 Polaroid Land camera weighing 250lb, and a studio tent complete with set and lighting designed by her husband. The resulting portraits, published in book form as Twins (2003), are both charming and slightly strange. Likewise her series Prom, from 2012, in which she pursued a fascination with the formal rituals of American high schools that had begun back in her cheerleader days at high school in suburban Philadelphia.

In 2014, Mark was awarded the Outstanding Contribution to Photography by the World Photography Organisation at the Sony photography awards in London and lifetime achievement award from George Eastman House in New York. “I care about people and that’s why I became a photographer,” she once said. Her empathy showed through in all her work.

Her husband survives her.

• Mary Ellen Mark, photographer, born 20 March 1940; died 25 May 2015