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Tiny from "Streetwise," Mary Ellen Mark's 1988 book about teenage runaways in Seattle. Mark, below, in 1973 by Ralph Gibson.
The photojournalist Mary Ellen Mark died on Monday in New York, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. Her website at MaryEllenMark.com has also confirmed her death, which the New York Times says was due to the blood disorder myelodysplastic syndrome. Her work over 50 years has documented American cities and cultures, twins, high school proms, movie sets, the prostitutes of Bombay and the work of Mother Teresa, among many other subjects.
Her photographs have appeared in Life, the New York Times Magazine, Vogue, Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair and other leading publishers of photography. Her photo essay in Life in 1983 and following book on runaway children in Seattle became the basis of "Streetwise," an Academy Award-nominated film in 1984 that was directed by her husband, Martin Bell. It won the special jury prize at Sundance. In Los Angeles, Mark's photos have appeared at the Getty and frequently at the Fahey-Klein Gallery.
She was one of the first female photographers allowed to join Magnum Photos but left the agency in 1981 to open her own studio and work independently.
Her latest of 18 books were 'Prom," a collection of 127 portraits from 13 schools across the country, published in 2012 by the Getty, and images of Mexico and India called Man and Beast, published last year by the University of Texas Press. An upcoming project is based on New Orleans and is to be published later this summer by CNN to mark the ten-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, says ArtForum. She also was working on a book for Armature following up on Tiny, one of the girls she photographed in Seattle in the 1980s, according to Time's obituary.
Earlier this year, Mark wrote on Time's website about a 1965 photo in Turkey that changed the direction of her life. Sample:
In 1965, I was in Trabzon in eastern Turkey on a Fulbright scholarship. I would get up every morning and walk around the streets and look for photographs. One day, I came across this beautiful young girl, Emine. She was wearing a very babyish dress and a bow in her hair. I photographed her, and she invited me to come to her home.
At her home, her mother gave me some tea and we went to the back area of her house where I took this picture. She just posed for me like that, I didn’t tell her what to do.I don’t like to photograph children as children. I like to see them as adults, as who they really are. I’m always looking for the side of who they might become. Emine was being very seductive in her own nine-year-old way. It’s interesting to me that she would show me that side of herself.
When I came back from Turkey and developed the film, I saw this picture and knew it was something special. I had been photographing for a couple of years before this, and I felt that sometimes you are looking and looking, and you are not sure what you are looking for. Often you look for the cliché and what you think makes a picture. This was the first time I felt I went beyond that. I thought this photograph transcended the image and had an edge.
We're saddened by the death of photographer Mary Ellen Mark. In 2012, we published her photos of the American Prom http://t.co/iFmF5XNULG
— Smithsonian Magazine (@SmithsonianMag) May 26, 2015“She was sort of chivalrous...a remarkable woman and a remarkable friend.” Mary Ellen Mark: http://t.co/9JjNAgaCDQ pic.twitter.com/2yjBCGZUgw
— NYT Photo (@nytimesphoto) May 26, 2015Rest in peace, Mary Ellen Mark http://t.co/Lx3hsTWUcG pic.twitter.com/p0y2LARB2O
— T Magazine (@tmagazine) May 26, 2015Mary Ellen Mark, the celebrated photographer and veteran of LIFE, has died http://t.co/4bvAVGmbb7
— LIFE (@LIFE) May 26, 2015Sign up for my NYC workshop before it's too late!
http://t.co/vzQa43xFlv
— Mary Ellen Mark (@MaryEllen_Mark) May 12, 2015