Mary Ellen Mark's 1976 Photographs Of Patients In A Locked Psychiatric Facility for Women

 

A new book by Mary Ellen Mark and Karen Folger Jacobs compiles photographs and interviews from 1976 with patients at Oregon State Hospital’s Ward 81. Here, Jacobs talks about the project’s illuminating legacy.

In the spring of 1976, photographer Mary Ellen Mark and her friend Karen Folger Jacobs, a writer and mental health professional, embarked on a trip to a women’s mental institution: Oregon State Hospital’s Ward 81. There they stayed for the duration of a month, photographing and interviewing the women confined within its walls. Often pushed to the margins of society and dismissed as dangerous, the patients of Ward 81 responded with delight to the interest from these visitors. Under the squalid living conditions and barbaric mental health treatments at the state hospital, these women were unaccustomed to the kindness and respect Mark and Jacobs approached them with throughout their project.

Mark’s photos, which have been compiled in a new book, Ward 81: Voices, flit between capturing deeply tender and jarringly raw moments, showing a vulnerability in her subjects that humanise them. Patients are caught with a sometimes surprising levity: striking a silly pose under harsh fluorescent lighting, doing yoga on the sanitarium’s sterile linoleum floors, watching Elvis Presley, starry-eyed, on a television screen. Portrait-style shots depict some of the Ward 81 women standing proudly in their stark surroundings: by a bath, next to a bed strewn with a few belongings, wrists strapped in the middle of an empty room. While Mark’s images reveal relatable qualities in her subjects (a sense of romance, for instance, as two women hug in a corner) some photographs reveal the undoubtedly disturbing truths of mental institutions, capturing electroshock therapy treatments and the cold loneliness of isolated living.

The book depicts a nuanced perspective on mental health in a moving exchange between Jacobs and a Ward 81 patient named Beth. “Beth, how do you feel?” Jacobs asks. In response, she says, “If I didn’t keep hearing all these voices talking to me all the time, things would be a lot better.” When asked about what the voices say, Beth’s response is so earnest and candid, it’s almost jarring: “Oh, they tell me I should break up with Mona and all kinds of things, but I don’t listen to ‘em.”

Nearly 50 years after the project, Karen Folger Jacobs reflects on Ward 81: Voices:

“Mary Ellen and I grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia and went to the same high school. We were people who really wanted to see wider horizons. We wanted to get out of our small suburb, and we both wanted to get out in the world. She ended up in New York and I ended up in California. So we wanted to do a project together, and she said that while she was working on One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, she had gotten to see the locked ward for women – Ward 81. I have a background in mental health and I’m licensed as a therapist in California, so we made plans to go there. My feeling was that this was going to be emotionally taxing for us. We were going to be with women who had been locked up, some for years, and we were not going to be able to do anything to release them.

 “We agreed that we would not interfere with the treatment of the people, we would not argue with the patients and we would not argue with any of the staff, despite any feelings we had about them. We would just be open to the patients, and get to know them and their culture. Mary Ellen and I had to be a team. We had to approach this together, and we never had any arguments or disagreements. There were times when we felt really angry about something that happened, or at some staff people, but we had each other.

“What we were trying to do was demonstrate life there. It was kind of an ethnography because we were trying to demonstrate a different culture, which she and I had already been doing in our work: going to other cultures and societies. It was very stressful, but one of the things I insisted on is that every night, Mary Ellen and I would talk about what happened. What we thought about it, what we did right or wrong, what she would do the next day. And during the day, I used my tape recorder to record the patients. They liked being able to talk, and having someone to listen. Often, they would just take the tape recorder and talk to it themselves.

“In the 70s, we had deinstitutionalisation, and most people were discharged from mental hospitals. This was Jimmy Carter’s thing, and I was on the presidential commission for mental health advising them about women. The Carter administration put these people out of the hospitals and the plan was to have community support and mental health, but the fact is, it didn’t get funded, so it didn’t happen. All these people get turned out in the street, and what happens? Nothing good. Where are they living? In a cardboard box, in a tent, on a corner, in a street in a big city. It’s terrible for these people, but they are products of our society. The book was written about people in 1976 and our world is very different now. Our world has, believe it or not, more stresses on people, particularly young people.

 “You and I may still have doubts and worries and problems, but these people mostly came from really disrupted families. Many of them were abused in various ways. What we need for mental health is not only focus on treating the people, but focus on what’s causing it. Why are these people so upset? How can we make living more generous, more bountiful, make people happier, enable people to have better lives?

“I insisted that we not see the patients’ records, what they allegedly had done, any psychiatrists’ evaluation. We didn’t want to see what anybody was accused of, because these people were all put in by a judge who had determined that they were a danger to themselves or others. I wanted us to treat these people as people and be friends with them. To be honest, I think they were thrilled to have someone who was interested in them. The staff were just obligated to do these tasks, give them medicine, serve meals, et cetera … Mary Ellen and I didn’t have tasks except to hang out with the patients all day.

“Every morning I would go out and run a few miles, just to de-stress. I would see all these flowers and stuff, it was spring. One time, coming back, I saw a Camellia bush. I started taking some for Mary Ellen, and then I thought, ‘oh no, I’m taking them for who really needs them.’ I brought the flowers upstairs and gave one to every patient. And one said, ‘this is the nicest thing that has ever happened to me in this hospital.’ Nobody did anything special for them. They didn’t have choices. They were deprived of a lot of things that we think of as normal.

“We felt really sad to be leaving them. They didn’t want us to – they kept telling us, ‘don’t go, we want you here.’ But we knew when we came that we were going to stay about a month. We didn’t feel that this treatment – being locked up, electroshock therapy – was very healthy for people. But our intent there was not to make an evaluation. Our intent was to be a pair of anthropologists. We were documenting a culture. We were seeing what was going on in a locked ward people couldn’t visit.

“I’m very glad that we were allowed to come and do this project. I feel incredibly privileged not to be in a hospital like this. I got this newfound gratitude for life from there and I still have it. I can choose things, I can go to the store and get clothes, get food I want, talk to people, have contact with anybody I want. It’s a gift. I have freedom in a way that these people didn’t have, and most people aren’t aware of other people without freedom. Mary Ellen and I appreciated the choices that we have, and the thing about when you’re in one of these institutions, you don’t have choices about stuff. We both said to each other that the Ward 81 project was perhaps the most important thing in our lives. And it still keeps impacting us. It’s been almost 50 years.”

Ward 81: Voices by Mary Ellen Mark and Karen Folger Jacobs is published by Steidl and is out now.

A Humanising But Harrowing Portrait of a 1970s Women’s Psych Ward. By Niki Colet.  AnOther,  May 25, 2023.

Throughout the span of her prolific, decades-long career, photographer Mary Ellen Mark made it her mission to document people on the margins of society — those whom she referred to as the “unfamous.” From homeless teens on the streets of Seattle to circus performers in India, she displayed unwavering compassion for every subject she met and inevitably kept in touch with most of them, a practice she maintained until her death in 2015.

Back in 1976, Mary Ellen undertook her biggest long-term project yet — photographing the women of Ward 81, an all-female psychiatric treatment facility inside Oregon State Hospital in Salem. She had her first encounter with the residents — many of whom were deemed ‘dangerous,’ — while on the set of the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in 1975. After a back-and-forth with the institution, along with the patients and their families, she managed to gain access almost a year later. Together with her collaborator, licensed therapist Dr. Karen Folger Jacobs, she lived and worked in Ward 81 for almost five weeks, returning to an adjacent wing at night to sleep.

“I became interested in the patients and asked their permission to come back later for some pictures,” Mary Ellen recalled later in an interview. “I lived very intensively with the patients for [several] weeks. I slept in a small cell and I ate with them in the morning. Just like everywhere, during my presence, people behaved tough and outside themselves [at first]. At some point, they got used to me and forgot I was there at all.”

Two years later, Mary Ellen published her seminal book Ward 81, which was praised for its nuanced portrayal of female psychiatric patients in the United States. A new exhibition now on view at the Image Centre in Toronto, Mary Ellen Mark: Ward 81, revisits this captivating body of work through a collection of 130 photographs, alongside audio recordings and other archival materials which have never been seen before. Created in collaboration with the Mary Ellen Mark Foundation and her husband Martin Bell, the exhibition accompanies a recent photo book from Steidl, Ward 81: Voices, which was released in January. Along with the show, the monograph expands upon Mary Ellen’s original book, providing a behind-the-scenes look at the project and some of her subjects’ distinct identities.

“We have quotes from the women on display, as well as some audio recordings and lots of other materials that contextualize Mary Ellen’s work and the time she spent in the ward,” says Gaëlle Morel, one of the show’s curators. “As a photographer, she really wanted to understand the quotidian lives of these women and what was happening to them. And in the process, of course, she also questioned the validity of the institution in a compelling way.”

Employing a social science method known as ‘participant observation,’ Mary Ellen and Karen enmeshed themselves in the daily goings-on of the residents, capturing anything from arts and crafts classes to the immeasurable horrors of electro-shock therapy. Even more groundbreaking than their sensitive approach was the pair’s dedication to consent and patient autonomy. Each of the residents chose whether or not they wanted to participate in the project, and some selected their own pseudonyms. This underlying sense of trust and familiarity reveals itself through Mary Ellen’s intimate shots of the women bathing, embracing, or staring longingly out the window, yearning for a world beyond the metal grates.

“One of my favorites is the photo of Beth and Mona together, because not only is it telling of the institution’s environment, but also their unique personalities,” Gaëlle says about a picture depicting a couple confined in the ward. Captured amidst a hydrotherapy session, one patient, Mona, stares defiantly at the camera, hands on her hips. She’s standing protectively in front of her wide-eyed partner Beth, whose body language is stiff and reserved. “You can immediately recognize the differences between the two of them and understand that these are people with their own individuality and character. That was very important to Mary Ellen.”

When they weren’t working in the ward, Mary Ellen and Karen left behind polaroid cameras and tape recorders for the women to put to use, granting them a right usually denied to those who’ve been involuntarily institutionalized: the freedom to shape their own self-image. “The idea was to give a voice to these women, to reverse the power dynamic, to give them a presence,” Gaëlle explains. “They had the opportunity to put on makeup or choose their own clothing, for example. It gave them agency in their representation.” Polaroids showing the patients smoking, laughing or simply posing with friends demonstrate the duality of life in a psychiatric facility, the emotional limbo of an experience that seemed to have no end in sight.

A similar sentiment underscores the curation at the Image Centre, featuring photographs grouped together by pseudonyms — Laurie, Carol S., Mary Grace, Suzie and so on – in order to let each of them stand out. Additional archival materials collected throughout the project range from recorded conversations between Mary Ellen and Karen, as well as conversations with the residents, to letters or drawings the women made, signed patient waivers, contact sheets, and press coverage. "They treat you like you're no good,” reads one wall quote from a patient named Tommie. “What they're saying is, you're in a mental hospital and therefore, you're stupid, you're an idiot, you're dumb [...], you're ugly, and you're no good, and you don't belong in this world..”

Ward 81 closed in November of 1977, when it was combined with another wing of the hospital to create a co-ed treatment facility. Still, the project came at a pivotal period for the discipline of documentary photography, as critics questioned the fine line between exploitation and empathy, especially regarding images of disenfranchised populations. “This was one of her first big projects, but the same themes were present throughout Mary Ellen’s whole career. She was constantly dealing with vulnerable people, especially women,” Gaëlle tells me. “How do you find the best approach to show the necessity of the situation, but also remain respectful? How can you do justice to the people or problems represented? It’s about recognizing them without othering them.”

Mary Ellen distinguished herself from a controversial history of aestheticizing patients in mental illness facilities by eschewing false notions of objectivity and infusing her photographs with tenderness and soul. She cared deeply about her subjects, not only during her weeks in the ward, but long after she left, carrying their stories with her wherever she went. Her unflinching images continue to have an impact nearly 50 years later, preserving the women’s humanity at a time when the state had attempted to strip it away.

“The women of Ward 81 are tattooed on our memories. We know that for the rest of our lives we will often dream about them. We will be surprised to wake up in a bed without straps or locks, and to be able to see out windows without wire barriers. And whenever anyone says ‘That’s bullshit,’ we will be reminded of the inmates and their emotional directness, their honesty, and their intolerance for phoniness,” Karen wrote in Ward 81. “We identify with the fragility and the strength of these women we came to love, these adopted sisters of ours. They are women we might have been or, women we might one day become.”

Photographing a women’s psychiatric ward in the 70s. By Christina Elia. i-D, March 16, 2023. 

Ward 81 — In 1976, Mary Ellen Mark was given unique access to Oregon State Hospital to photographlife on the high security Ward 81, creating a nuanced and compassionate portrayal of female mental health patients.

Ken Kesey’s groundbreaking novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was adapted for the silver screen in 1975, captivating audiences worldwide with its unflinching look at life inside the high security ward of a state mental hospital. That same year, American photographer Mary Ellen Mark was commissioned to do a story on the making of the film, which was shot on location at Oregon State Hospital. While there, she met the patients at Ward 81 – the state’s only locked psychiatric facility for women.

In February 1976, Mark spent 36 days living on Ward 81 with Karen Folger Jacobs, a writer and licensed therapist, to photograph and interview the women. Together they created Ward 81 – a compassionate chronicle and rare insight into the lives of women institutionalised for mental illness.

“I wanted to do an essay on the personalities of people who are locked away – to show a little bit of what they’re like, especially the women. I didn’t want to show them as exotically crazy,” Mark told Time in 1978, when the work from Ward 81 was first exhibited and published as a book.

The work has largely gone unseen — until now. With the forthcoming book from Steidl and ongoing exhibition at The Image Centre, the women of Ward 81 return to view, their stories and experiences preserved in photographs, audio recordings and archival materials weaved together throughout the exhibition.

Mark and Folger Jacobs took care to avoid sensationalism, treating the women they encountered as complex individuals. “The approach they designed embodies the concept of care ethics, which emphasises, above all, that we exist in relationship to one another and can help each other meet basic needs and avoid suffering,” says  co-curator Kaitlin Booher, Newhall Curatorial Fellow at the Museum of Modern Art.

“After going through an extended process to get permission to photograph, they approached the women foremost by paying attention to them and getting to know them, and that translates into the work they produced,” Booher continues. “It’s clear from the audio tapes the women recorded, the cards and letters they wrote, and the level of intimacy revealed in the photographs that Folger Jacobs and Mark were not only accepted there – but they made an impact.”

After Ward 81 was published, Folger Jacobs joined President Jimmy Carter’s mental health task force, presented her findings, and argued that women did not receive the same levels of care and treatment afforded to men by the state.

Nearly half a century later, conversations about mental health have become more open, yet many stigmas persist, making the work Mark and Folger Jacobs did all the more resonant.

“The idea was to provide a different perspective on mental health, and in particular how it affects women,” says co-curator Gaëlle Morel, Exhibitions Coordinator at The Image Centre. “Being able to experience an exhibition where the photographer tried a different approach (closeness, empathy, time) can guide us towards a better understanding and acceptance.” 

 Inside Oregon's Only Locked Psychiatric Facility for Women. By Miss Rosen. Huck Magazine, March, 6, 2023. 

          

The Book published by Steidl

In 1976, American photographer Mary Ellen Mark spent thirty-six days living in the Oregon State Hospital with licensed therapist and writer Karen Folger Jacobs, Ph.D., to photograph the patients of Ward 81—a high security, locked psychiatric facility for women. Mark’s unique access led to a nuanced and compelling portrayal of female mental health patients. This exhibition brings together the resulting photographs, audio recordings and archival materials to offer an in-depth view of the artist’s experimental and groundbreaking approach to documentary-style photography.
 
Organized by The Image Centre, Toronto in collaboration with Falkland Road Inc./The Mary Ellen Mark Foundation, New York.

Join IMC Exhibitions Curator Gaëlle Morel and Guest Curator Kaitlin Booher for a virtual talk focused on Mary Ellen Mark's groundbreaking approach to documentary photography and her seminal project portraying the lives of female mental health patients in the Oregon State Hospital (1976). Presented in conjunction with the exhibition "Mary Ellen Mark: Ward 81," on view through April 1, 2023, at the IMC. This event took place on Wednesday, March 22, 2023, via Zoom.

The Image Centre, March 23, 2023. 

Show at The Image Centre

­­It's been five years since filmmaker Martin Bell lost his wife and professional partner, documentary photographer Mary Ellen Mark.

From the time she first picked up a Brownie Box camera at age 9 until she received a Masters in photojournalism at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School, Mark became increasingly smitten with the storytelling power of a well-framed photograph — her subjects of choice: people rarely depicted in the cultural zeitgeist. "Mary Ellen could see a story in the ordinary that you might just walk by and not even see," Bell says. "And she had the ability to reduce that story, as simple or complex as it was, to a single frame."

Bell is unsure whether it was a labor of love or act of madness (or perhaps a little of both), but immediately after Mark's death, he began the daunting task of sifting through all of her contact sheets and Kodachrome slides — more than two million images —representing her life's work. "Nobody in their right mind would take on this task," says Bell. The mission was to cull the frames down for a retrospective book that would be true to the photographic trail she blazed around the globe.

For the better part of four years, Bell, along with Meredith Lue and Julia Bezgin, who run Mary Ellen Mark's photo library and studio, distilled Mark's brilliant career down to 515 plates: photographs shot over more than a half-century, from 1963 to a month before her death in 2015. Mark's lenses captured recurring interests — the Indian circus, the Twins Festival in Twinsburg, Ohio, growing up in America and often, faces of people on the margins of society we too often ignore. The essence of Mary Ellen Mark's work now fills three coffee table books, 850 pages total, weighing in at more than 16 pounds and boxed as The Book of Everything (Steidl).

When he opened the door to greet Mary Ellen Mark in 1992, Clayton Moore was wearing a mask and never took it off during a shoot for Mark's photo essay on old cowboys. Moore was, after all, the Lone Ranger, and stayed the Lone Ranger in personal appearances for 40 years after the hit television series ended in 1957.

 "I photographed him at his home. It was a modern house, but he still lived the part of the Lone Ranger. He insisted on wearing his famous mask for all the pictures. I had to do everything I could to make him feel at ease with my camera and me, because he was extremely paranoid. When I was finished photographing him, he insisted that I sign all kinds of papers. As I left, I told him how much I enjoyed meeting him and that I was a big fan. He said to me, 'if you're such a big fan ... what was the name of my horse?' I said, 'Trigger.' He looked at me in a very scornful way. I quickly realized that I had made a serious blunder. Trigger was Roy Rogers's horse; Silver was the Lone Ranger's horse. I'm sure he never forgave me."

During her career, Mark found herself on more than 100 movie sets — as a "special stills photographer," hired for publicity or advertising shots — Fellini's Satyricon, Gandhi, Apocalypse Now, among them. But it was on the set of Milos Forman's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, where her commercial and documentary work intersected.

While One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was being shot, the director of the hospital gave Mark a tour. She was so affected by the maximum security women's Ward 81 that she corresponded with Dr. Dean Brooks for nearly a year and finally got access. For 36 days she lived on Ward 81, shining a light on a corner of life few of us see — the institutionalized mentally ill.

Mark's lifelong passion was to give visibility to the invisible. It would be an assignment for Life Magazine in 1983 that became a lifelong project, personally and professionally. Life sent Mark to Seattle, which had been named "America's most livable city," to document runaway teenagers. The story got a lot of attention.

Author John Irving called Mark's photos of the runaways on Pike Street "the perfect characters for the perfect story because they were both perfect and important victims...pimps, prostitutes, and petty thieves, they were eating out of dumpsters, falling in love, getting tattooed, being treated for the variety of venereal diseases passed on to them by their customers."

As Senior Producer of Nightline at ABC, I took Mark back to Seattle as she checked in with the runaways, now in their 20's for a two-part Nightline special on the 10th anniversary of her Life story. It was a rare opportunity to see up-close Mark's special ability to relate to the subjects she shot. Martin Bell put it this way: "Her relationship with the people she photographed was amazing. It was like an instant connection."

Mark didn't simply parachute into her assignment and move on to the next one. Each one became part of her effort to build a tapestry of relationships. Case in point: Erin Blackwell — better known as "Tiny," who Mark first encountered and photographed as a 13-year-old, surviving any way she could on Seattle's streets —including selling herself to men who were interested.

Mark and Bell were so taken with Blackwell that they returned to Seattle months later and featured Tiny in Bell's Oscar-nominated film Streetwise.

Tiny would become part of Mark and Bell's extended family. She's now 51, still in touch with Bell, still struggling and still a survivor with ten children.

 On a balcony overlooking New York's Fifth Avenue, at the celebration of Mary Ellen Mark's life a few months after she died, I heard a familiar voice. When I looked up, Candice Bergen was engaged in a conversation next to me. Mark and Bergen were at the University of Pennsylvania together and remained friends throughout their lives.

More than a decade after their college days, Mark had a magazine assignment to photograph Bergen's father, the ventriloquist Edgar Bergen, but they didn't want the dummy, Charlie McCarthy, in the picture. As Mark told an interviewer, "I first started photographing him alone, and he was very self-conscious; he was uncomfortable. So Bergen's son, Kris, got Charlie, Bergen sat down in the chair and took him out of the suitcase."

"I think it's two frames — it just happened so fast. I thought it was amazing. It's just one of those things — you know exactly what it is. Photography's very weird because it has to be extremely subtle, and yet it has to be non-subtle at the same time."

I would see Mark a final time at a photo lecture she delivered at the Smithsonian's Museum of American Art in Washington in 2013 where she projected the sweep of her work before a filled auditorium. Mark didn't know it at the time, but her talk was a preview of The Book of Everything — the story of her professional life, a project she never planned, let alone saw completed.

Near the end of that lecture, Mark took questions. One was about her preference to shoot in black and white. She explained, "I see in black and white. The subjects I seem to pick work better in black and white." Mark may have seen in black and white, but given the complex stories she reduces to a frame, one could say she specialized in shades of gray.

Documentary photography had all but vanished from the pages of magazines by 2013 when someone asked Mark if there was a future in the world she had been immersed in for much of her career. "I haven't had a magazine call me for over a year," she lamented, because today's magazines are heavily Photoshopped and they want a certain style. I'm kind of a purist who loves reality. I'm not an illustrator. I'm not going to let a bunch of art directors have me stop photographing."

Then she stopped and punctuated her point for the Smithsonian audience, "I feel lucky in a way because I had the best of it. You have to fight for what you believe in if you want to do anything worthwhile."

Bell doesn't sugarcoat the toll it took on his wife. "It was a difficult reality for Mary Ellen to confront. She'd lived and worked essentially through the golden age of magazines where photography was often coming from the streets. It was hard for her to deal with this, but it didn't stop her from going out and working."

There are countless places the public doesn't see. Occasionally, a photographer allows a peek into the hidden. Such was Mark's Life Magazine assignment to photograph patients suffering from Hansen's disease, formerly known as leprosy.

 "Officials there tried to steer me to what they wanted me to see," she said. But when she walked past this woman's room she stopped and asked if she could take pictures. The woman agreed. Blinded by her disease, her face is like a death mask held delicately in the strong arms of her nurse.

In Mark's ongoing effort to document how children are often the canaries in the coal mine of society — providing clues to the future health of a neighborhood — she spent some time in a South Dallas community devastated by crack in 1998 for Texas Monthly. The magazine reported that the kids wouldn't stay away from the drug scene because it often provided the only jobs — even lookouts were paid $100 a day.

One of the last photographs Mary Ellen took, just a month before she died, was for CNN, documenting New Orleans ten years after the floods of Hurricane Katrina. Fittingly, The Book of Everything concludes with a photograph of Thomas Schulingkamp, 26, whose family evacuated to Michigan for eight years after the hurricane and only returned when a New Orleans' school that could accommodate Thomas' special needs reopened.

Thomas' mother, Miriam Schulingkamp, who's adjusting her son's bow tie in the photo, sums up Mary Ellen Mark:

"Mary Ellen, with her long braids and open presence, tuned into Thomas, dressed in the manner of a Southern gentleman in a seersucker suit. He points to jewelry and items of clothing to start conversations, which can startle people. Mary Ellen did not hesitate with her words or look to me for instruction. She spoke directly and easily with Thomas, as if they had known each other for years. His bow ties were laid out so she could pick the one she wanted. With great attention, she talked with Thomas about the possibilities and they jointly made a decision. I did have reservations about how Thomas would cope with a photo shoot, as he does not always respond to specific and multiple directions. I feared that Mary Ellen would be frustrated, but she waved away my concern."

Had she lived, Martin Bell is convinced Mary Ellen Mark would never have taken the time to create this book. And it's probably just as likely that had she lived, Mary Ellen Mark would not have stayed hunkered down at this socially distant, masked moment in our lives. Somehow, she would have found a way to break out of her bubble and do what she had always been driven to do — grab her Leica and capture the people and stories others had passed by, making meaningful connections with those on the fringe. As she told an interviewer in Oregon in 2010, taking photographs is "like playing an instrument. The more you play, the better you get."

After spending four years creating this photographic love letter to his late wife, Martin Bell gets the final word on the final page of The Book of Everything. Mary Ellen must be smiling as her husband and partner describes her as "fearless...steadfastly true to herself and to her work. Even when overwhelmed with doubts, she was a defiant warrior."

 

The Essence Of Mary Ellen Mark, The Invisible Made Visible. By Richard L. Harris. NPR, November 22, 2020.

Mary Ellen Mark Website