Mary Ellen Mark

Since she started taking photographs, Mary Ellen Mark (1940–2015) cast her unique gaze on the world—from Indian circus performers to Mumbai's red-light district, Hollywood film sets, and psychiatric hospitals. Her work in both film and photography feeds on the visible. Without a referent, there is no image, which emerges from the simultaneous presence of subject, camera, and photographer. Every photographer has the duty to capture—or rather, to grasp in an instant, given how crucial concurrence and coincidence are—reality, whatever the cost.

The way Mary Ellen Mark approaches the world is above all with a closeness to people. And in her work, the physical and participatory contiguity with others is surprisingly evident. There is no desire to show the exotic, the extraordinary, or the monstrous. Her work is not driven by a specific event, but by the ever-renewed experience of the presence of others in their daily lives, captured in their social environment, and frozen in the fixity of the image, in the two-dimensionality of the photograph. It is difficult to describe her work, to label it, because she was always on the borderline between reportage, documentary photography, and portraiture. In short, one could venture to say that she was a "social portraitist." And in this aptitude for capturing reality, in this intersection of photographic genres, lies the fascination of her images.

This unprecedented retrospective dedicated to Mary Ellen Mark traces her extraordinary career through nearly 200 color and black-and- white photographs.