“The Photographs I Love” 6 – Mary Ellen Mark

“Many people ask me how I created such a sense of intimacy in my photographs.
This is a question that is impossible to answer.
You are what you are.”
(Mary Ellen Mark)

“Kamla behind the curtains with a customer”. Falkland Road, Bombay, India, 1978

The time has come to give space to the female gaze of Mary Ellen Mark, the American photographer born in Philadelphia in 1940 and died in New York in 2015.

My sixth choice.

Mary Ellen Mark

As she herself writes in the splendid book “On the Portrait and the Moment”, her life changed in 1963, when she discovered photography at the time of the university in Pennsylvania. Walking through the streets of the city, with the camera in hand, she understands the potential that this tool offers her:

“I realized that the camera allowed me to connect with others like never before. It gave me the opportunity to enter their lives, satisfying a curiosity that had always been there, but which until then had remained unexplored. That day, a world opened up to me. I became aware of the infinite possibilities that the camera offered me; of all the images I could have taken, the lives I would have explored, of all the people I could have met and how much I would have learned from them.”

 

Mary Ellen Mark is a headstrong and persistent woman, and she knew what she wanted to photograph.

She was attracted to the borderline lives, of those who struggled every day in existences on the margins of society, not far from the aesthetics of another photographer, Diane Arbus, but – in my opinion – with much more empathy and love; often Arbus's portraits are cold and deliberately disturbing, in Mark's photographs one can feel more the emotional closeness and always the absence of any moral judgment.

It was essential for her to communicate the emotions of the protagonists of her photos. She was not interested in the exotic or the disturbing, as is palpable in the photos of the Indian circuses I have already talked about.

“The content, the emotion, the composition and the depth.”

These are the basic requirements of a great photo, in her opinion. 

Her reportages have entered the history of photography. Like the story of Tiny, photographed in the early 1980s on a commission from LIFE magazine, about street children. Eventually, she photographed her for over 32 years. Like a friendly shadow of her difficult existence, among drugs, prostitution, violent husbands and the growth of her two beloved daughters. 

A work that, page after page, takes your breath away for its dramatic beauty. 

Usually, her works are in black and white. 

The exception was the reportage on Falkland Road, from which the photograph I chose for her, and from which all the other photos are taken.

As I wrote at the beginning, Mark is famous for her stubbornness, and this work is the clearest evidence of that.

It took her ten years of waiting to take these photographs, in Bombay's most famous red light district.

The first time she went to India was in 1968.

From the first moment she was attracted from this famous street, with its brothels in ancient two-storey wooden buildings, with cages on the windows.

Within them, Indian prostitutes from 12 to 65 years old exercised, commanded by the mistresses – the madam.

She tried in every way to get permission to photograph their lives, for ten years, every time she came back to India, she was always denied: they insulted her, beat her, and stole her wallet.

No way. She never gave up.

Until, in 1978, she managed to get a commission from GEO to return to Falkland Road, and after weeks of incessant attempts, knocking on their doors, she succeeded to make friends with Saroja, one of the madams, struck by her obstinacy in learning about life at inside the brothel.

Her friendship with Saroja opened the doors to that micro world, made up of buildings in which each room was a brothel with a madam who managed four to twelve prostitutes.

Mary Ellen Mark became friends with each of them, collecting their life stories made up of kidnappings, drugs, diseases, violence, but also of dreams and hopes in a completely female world, where men were only occasional customers.

Indeed, the prostitutes themselves protected her and hid her under the beds when the police broke into the brothels.

She was with them, even when the women worked with clients, in the narrow colored rooms, with the flash ready to capture every moan, tear to smile. As in the photo of Kamla I chose, which was Mark's careful reflection as a snake bite, who – while talking to the madam of the brothel – saw the curtain rise and reveal Kamla's smiling face with a client, whose hand holds her face: not even time to think and snapped. Pure photographic instinct.

This is how she describes the photo:

“I would hear a voices from behind the curtains; once a customer saying, “My glasses, my glasses, where are my glasses?” and a thirteen-year-old prostitute saying, “Come on now, behave, be proper.”

 

Three months lived with these women, the cheapest prostitutes in Bombay.

When she had to leave it was a heartbreaking moment, with Mary Ellen Mark who couldn't stop crying and hugging the girls, especially Saroja.

The book was first published by Alfred Knopf in 1981.

In the Afterword to the book, Mark is amazed at how she managed to get the commission for this work and for its publication, reflecting on how in today's times it would be impossible for a magazine to commission such a reportage.

Saroja (left), with one of her girls. 

Saroja: “Given the choice, I would have rather stayed in my village. 

But if I had stayed there, I would never have known what I had missed.”

A year after its publication, she returned to Falkland Road, looking for Saroja to give her a copy of the book; she had already moved to work in an even poorer slum and was thin and sick. AIDS was now a daily reality.

After fifteen years she comes back again with her husband and writer John Irving, but everything had changed. There are much more prostitutes, violence and drugs. A too dangerous and soulless place.

In her heart were still present the protagonists of her photos and stories of fifteen years earlier.

Her dedication is already on the first page of the book:

“Like most countries, India has fancy brothels and expensive call girls.

But the pictures in this book were taken on a street in Bombay where the less expensive prostitutes lives and work; an area famous for the cage-girl houses in which some of the women live.

These photographs were taken between October 1978 and January 1979. During that time I got to know and then enter the world of some of the women on Falkland Road. They were very special women. This book is for them – with deep thanks to my friend Saroja.”

Choosing a photo among the 65 photographs in the book was not easy.

Obviously many of these are raw, direct, a short distance from the naked bodies of prostitutes.

It wasn't easy to get this book either, I had to have a friend buy it from London and bring it to me. But now it's untouchable in my library.

My admiration for the American photographer is boundless, for her tenacity, obstinacy and human depth.

Not only for what preceded the reportage itself, the ten years of desire and refusal, or the weeks of obstinacy to be able to enter the brothels. But above all, because two years later she returned there, carrying a copy of the book, looking for those prostitutes, and embracing again those who had allowed her to share their lives.

Attitudes like these only very few photographers have. We don't speak only of technical skill but of depth of soul, gratitude, and love. 

Even in the most infamous street in Bombay, among the cages where no one would ever think of talking about sentiment and dignity.

Mary Ellen Mark, with this book and her actions, left us a valuable lesson.

Dedicated to her, to Saroja, and to all the lost souls of Falkland Road.

“How do you know if photography is your way? If it's something you love, if it's something you can't get rid of, if you've been consumed by it, if you're obsessed with it, then maybe it's something you just shouldn't give up on. It is not an easy life. But if you love it, it cannot be renounced.”
(Mary Ellen Mark) 

READ ALSO:

• Siamese Twins 
• The Ancient Light: “My Bangladesh” Photo Series (2) 

Mary Ellen Mark: “Falkland Road – Prostitutes of Bombay” (Steidl, 2005)
Mary Ellen Mark: “Tiny – Streetwise revisited” (Aperture, 2015)
Mary Ellen Mark: “On the Portrait and the Moment” (Postcart \ Aperture, 2016)

 

Italian version