MARY ELLEN MARK - PART 1

INTERVIEW BY STEVE LAFRENIERE
PORTRAIT BY ROE ETHRIDGE

Mary Ellen Mark holds down a double slot in the world of photography. Widely known for stark, unblinking photojournalism, she also maintains a separate career as a production portraitist for the movie industry. A 1969 magazine feature on Federico Fellini filming Satyricon became her calling card in Hollywood. Afterward, she went on to shoot some of the most revealing photos ever taken of Marlon Brando, Jodie Foster, Johnny Depp, and many other stars. But Mark is still most regarded for her groundbreaking photo essays. Beginning with assignments for Life, Esquire, and Look magazines in the late 60s, her pictures show an unyielding eye for bathos and the jarring details of her subjects’ lives. Her 1979 stay with the inmates of a maximum-security women’s mental hospital resulted in the heartrending Ward 81, while in Falkland Road she exposed the severe daily life of a Bombay brothel. Other subjects have included British working-class junkies, Indian circus performers, the Aryan Nations, and a poor black family’s Halloween celebration in the South Bronx. She’s considered a master of the telling moment, and it’s a talent that she uses throughout the entire spectrum of her work—the viewer invariably comes away with the feeling of having experienced her subjects in the flesh.

In 1983, after finishing an assignment for Life about teenage runaways in Seattle, Mark and her husband, Martin Bell, documented the subjects again, but this time on film. Streetwise remains a brutal slice of life that’s reverberated with documentary filmmakers ever since. The current rerelease of the original photo book had us wondering about the whereabouts of Tiny, Rat, and Shadow.



Vice: It’s the 25th anniversary of Streetwise. Are you still in contact with any of the central subjects?

Mary Ellen Mark: I’m still in contact with Tiny. A few years ago, Martin and I went back to Seattle and we updated her life. And I’ve been photographing her—I haven’t been back there in three years—but I have been photographing her. I photographed her after she had her ninth baby but we couldn’t make it out there for her tenth. [laughs]

Click here for a slide show of Mary's work.

Where does she live?

She lives in Seattle, in the suburbs near the airport.

How about any of the others, like Rat?

Well, Rat drives a pickup.

I’m a little startled that they’re still alive.

Yeah, he’s been in and out of jail a few times. I think Mike is in jail. Shadow is a security guard. Let me see, Patti died of AIDS. I think Roberta was murdered by the Green River Killer. Lulu died years ago. She was stabbed.

One would think that Tiny wouldn’t have lived through her adolescence.

She says sometimes that she really wants to put herself in a lab so they can figure out why she’s made it this far. Another thing—she’s married now. Her last five kids were by the same man.

And ten kids—wow. Was Streetwise an assignment or did you pitch it?

That was an assignment from Life. I was there for, like, three weeks to do the story.

How did you gain their trust? Did you live down in that area?

No, but we knew the kids. The writer for the piece—who is no longer alive, actually—got to know them. Both of us made friends, and one of the kids, Lulu, really liked us. I think she’s the one, more than anyone else, who helped us get access.

I especially love the picture of Tiny on Halloween where she has the hat and the gloves on. It’s a beautiful portrait. As a matter of fact, I knew that image for years before I even knew what it was. A friend of mine had it on her wall from a magazine or a book.

It’s so strange why certain pictures endure. I don’t know, I guess it’s just something about her face and the hat—she was so beautiful. It’s one of the easiest pictures I ever took because it’s almost like a fashion picture but it’s real.

What was interesting was that you were photographing these people who wanted to be glamorous, and here you are aiming a camera at her. Did that become kind of a weird blur?

When people are in front of your camera and you spend a long time with them, it’s almost like you’re making a movie. And then Martin went back and made an actual movie and at that time we knew all the kids because we were following the story so we knew the connections and the friendships and who hated who.

Were those scenes sort of reenactments of things you already knew about them? Was it scripted? That’s always been a question about the film.

Nothing was scripted. People think it was because they were so open, but absolutely nothing was scripted. I was even accused of that when the story came out. It’s just that somehow there was such a connection with these kids. And there still is when I walk into Tiny’s house. She’s able to open up for us, and the other kids were too. They were really into the drama of their lives. They were living a kind of a fairy tale—a twisted fairy tale, but a fairy tale—away from their families, often away from homes that were not so happy. We became witnesses to that, so they let their lives unfold in front of us.

Did Martin shoot a lot of extra footage for the film?

Martin is economical in the way that he shoots. He’s very sure of himself when he’s shooting. He’s a wonderful cinematographer. He always works on a tripod, so there’s very little handheld. Although, some of stuff on the street had to be handheld, like when the boy’s mother meets him on the street. We weren’t prepared so we had to run across to the parking lot. Martin is also very technical, so the sound was very good. He worked with the same wonderful sound technician that he’s been with for years.

So you became friends with some of the subjects from Streetwise. What about a group of subjects that might be harder to relate to, like the Aryan Nations’ followers?

With the Aryan Nations, I got access for just a few days. They wouldn’t let me inside—I had to say outside. They made an announcement and the people who wanted to be photographed came out. I stayed a few days and then they started to get incredibly paranoid. They’re very paranoid people. Then I left.

What are you feeling in a situation like that? Are you completely objective?

No, I’m subjective with everybody. You have to be subjective no matter what you do. Even with a portrait you’re subjective. It’s your impression of somebody. You want to be fair but subjective. With the Aryan Nations, I just didn’t talk much. I figured no matter what I said it was going to be looked at as negative. So I just kept my mouth shut. I didn’t say, “Oh, you’re so lucky to be part of the Aryan Nations.” I can’t be a hypocrite. Friends of mine know that I’m bluntly honest.


TO BE CONTINUED
MARY ELLEN MARK | 1 | 2 |

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