Mary Ellen Mark...

'mood board of Mary Ellen Marks work'

Mary Ellen Mark is an American documentary photographer,best known for her photojournalism,portraiture and advertising photography. She is now 74 but she has 16 exhibitions of her photography work in galleries and museums worldwide.She takes photos of families and teenagers who are doing everyday things,however she also takes images of more powerful things such as the Vietnam war demonstrations and the women liberation movement. However in all of her work she is documenting  events and relationships between people. In a lot of the images above she follows one girl and tracks the events in her day with different people and different surroundings and places to keep a record or track of the events in her day. She also takes documentary photos of families and family life,highly influenced from the era she was in when she took them. She focuses of people who wouldn't normally be the first people to have a photo-shoot done, people who don't fit into the norms of acceptable society. She chooses to photograph these people as it is different and unexpected from normal portrait or documentary photography, it's not fake or fabricated to be something it's not like most photoshopped photoshoots. 
The style of her work address social issues such as homelessness,loneliness, drug addiction and prostitiution, which again was highly influenced by the era and time that she took these photographs.

"I've always thought that children and teenagers are not 'children' they are small people. I look at them as small people and I either like them or I don't like them. I also have an obsession with mental illness. And strange people who are outside the borders of society." 
-Mary Ellen Mark
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Ellen_Mark)

The reason I chose Mary Ellen Mark to develop the documentary side of 'track' is because she follows people doing every day things day by day such as going to the park or going out with friends. She tracks the day to day things that we wouldn't normally photograph or notice when we are actually doing them. She documents simple and unfabricated events and makes them into a series of tracked moments and memories,that would normally go unnoticed when they are actually taking place. 

Image Analysis…


Objectively, in this image there is two girls, one sitting down in the background with the garden behind her and the other standing looking into the camera. They are both in a paddling pool and both focusing on the camera. The girl standing up has a cigarette in her hand and is blowing smoke out of her mouth with one arm crossed over her stomach,as the other points upwards with the cigarette in between her fingers. The girls in this image look young and somewhat vulnerable,however confident and content with what they are doing. However subjectively, the girls in the image are clearly underage to be smoking and this could suggest the background they are from. The stance of the girl in the foreground suggests that she is somewhat proud of what she is doing and it's not out of the ordinary for them. The girl standing up, although she looks young, she looks like she acts a lot older than her age and dresses older too. She looks dominant ,almost as if she is protecting the girl sat down,from the camera. The black and white effect on a lot of documentary photographs gives the image a more earthy and authentic feel which can reflect the generation or era in the image.


No comments:

Post a Comment