I had not been familiar with Mary Ellen Mark's photography before attending yesterday the current exhibit of her portrait work at the Howard Greenberg Gallery on West 57th Street. This was an oversight on my part. The late photographer - she passed away last year at age 75 - was extremely talented at capturing the personalities of her sitters and along the way created a number of imaginative and innovative works.
Many of the portraits on display depict troubled youths, sometimes barely older than children. One of the best of these is a 1983 study of a young girl from Seattle entitled Tiny blowing a bubble. The manner in which the subject confronts the camera head on is characteristic of Mark's style. There's no artifice here and no attempt to strike a pose. Instead Tiny has an air of worldliness that belies her young age. The same can be seen even more forcefully in a shot from 1990, Amanda and Her Cousin Amy Valdese, that shows a young girl standing in a wading pool and smoking a cigarette while staring coolly into the lens. Photos such as these and the 1994 Chrissy Damm and Adam Johnson belie the myth of childhood innocence. The subjects possess an adult sensibility that is almost jaded in its appraisal of the adult world surrounding them.
One section of the exhibit is given over to large format Polaroids measuring 30 x 22. The use of the view camera in portraiture carries with it an inherent formalism. It's not possible to take a quick shot with this equipment. The photographer must instead study the composition of the ground glass in reverse and inverted form before inserting the plate holder and snapping the shutter. The examples here fall into two categories. The first three were shot at high school proms in 2008 and each show two subjects standing side by side. Somehow, though the students stand in close proximity to one another, they are at the same time isolated, each in his or her own world. The second set of three photos again show two subjects, but this time the subjects are identical twins photographed at a "twins festival" held, appropriately enough, in Twinsburg, Ohio in 2001. Again there is a psychological distance between the two subjects, in this case made even more striking by the close resemblance between them.
From here the viewer moves on to a selection of celebrity portraits, most of them taken on location rather than having been shot in a studio. According to Mark's Wikipedia biography, she worked as a "unit photographer" and shot production stills on more than one hundred feature films. None of those are included in this exhibit, however, only the one-on-one portraits she took of the films' stars. The problem here is that the subjects, practiced in posing before cameras, are too self conscious to reveal much of themselves. Photos of such stars as Jeff Bridges, Marlon Brando, Woody Allen, Sean Penn and Johnny Depp, while exceptionally well executed, show nothing of these actors' inner selves but only the public personae with which they face the public. The exception is the photo of Patrick Swayze in drag and makeup standing on his lawn with his dog at his feet. More successful are the celebrity portraits of Henry Miller and Clayton Moore. In the first, taken in 1975, the elderly author wears a lecherous grin while seated in a wheelchair with the model Twinka kneeling behind him. It is in the portrait of Clayton Moore that one sees most clearly the influence Diane Arbus had on Marks. The former "Lone Ranger," now a very old man indeed, sits on a couch in his living room in full costume including mask. Beside him is a statuette that shows the Ranger atop his rearing horse in the character's most iconic pose while above him hangs a framed Victorian portrait (his mother?). It is the very normalcy of the surroundings that make this photo so unsettling.
There are a couple of color portraits of Indian and Nepalese prostitutes on view, but the inclusion of these shots only serve to make clear that it was black & white film photography that was Mark's true metier. She was one of the last century's true masters of the medium.
The exhibit continues through June 18, 2016.
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