American Odyssey by Mary Ellen Mark, 1999

“You can find everything in this country, anything goes, and anything can happen”

– Mary Ellen Mark, American Odyssey

 

 

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The first collection of the extensive and superlative work realized by Mary Ellen Mark (20 March 1940 – 25 May 2015) in the United States, Mary Ellen Mark is composed of many previously unpublished images, as well as photographs from several of her best-known projects. From “Streetwise” to “The Damm Family,” Mary Ellen Mark includes the most iconic images from these groundbreaking stories, as well as powerful, never-before-seen photographs Mark accomplished in subsequent years. She makes a deeply felt commitment to her subjects, and her empathy and humanity come through in every image.

Mark is unsurpassed at shaping not only the odd but the everyday into genuinely surprising visual icons. With an eye for symbolism and a gift for meticulous composition, she is drawn to a variety of spectacles and situations, and demonstrates a particular affinity for children. Her elegantly revealing imagery creates a fascinating portrait of our complex, amusing, and occasionally unsettling country.

 

 

Photographs can be enigmatic. They sometimes work because of what is included in the frame; and sometimes because of what is not. There’s no formula for taking pictures. It’s a mysterious process; an endless challenge. Ideas for projects are constantly unfolding and possibilities reveal themselves around every corner. The trick is to be open enough to recognize them the moment they appear and driven enough to pursue them.

– Mary Ellen Mark

 

 

When the camera is between me and the subject, it often shields me from a grim reality while allowing me access to otherwise impenetrable worlds.In the early 1970s I worked on Milos Forman’s film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest making still photographs. While the film was being made Dr. Dean Brooks, who was the head of Oregon State Hospital, gave me a tour of the facilities. The patients in Ward 81, the hospital’s maximum-security women’s ward, fascinated me and I returned to photograph there two years after the film ended. This experience profoundly changed the way I approach my work.

– Mary Ellen Mark

 

 

I always try to find the quirkiness in my subjects, to go beyond clichés and discover the common human element that connects people all over the world.I like to think that my photographs stand on their own as singular images. In that sense, I am not really a photo-essayist. I am always thinking about making pictures that speak for themselves.

– Mary Ellen Mark

 

 

“Life is also arbitrary. For example, the choices that you make, the luck of being born into the right bed, to parents who support and help you, and who love you. That doesn’t always happen—and then, what happens when it doesn’t?”

– Mark Ellen Mark