Mary Ellen Mark

Mary Ellen Mark (born March 20, 1940) is an American photographer known for her photojournalism, portraiture, and advertising photography. She has had 16 collections of her work published and has been exhibited at galleries and museums worldwide. She has received numerous accolades, including three Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards and three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.
== Early life and career ==
Mary Ellen Mark was born in suburban Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and began photographing with a Box Brownie camera at age nine. She attended Cheltenham High School, where she was head cheerleader and exhibited a knack for painting and drawing. She received a BFA degree in painting and art history from the University of Pennsylvania in 1962, and a Masters Degree in photojournalism from that university's Annenberg School for Communication in 1964. The following year, Mark received a Fulbright Scholarship to photograph in Turkey for a year. While there, she also traveled to photograph England, Germany, Greece, Italy, and Spain.
In 1966 or 1967, she moved to New York City, where over the next several years she photographed Viet Nam War demonstrations, the women's liberation movement, transvestite culture, and Times Square, developing a sensibility, according to one writer, "away from mainstream society and toward its more interesting, often troubled fringes". As Mark explained in 1987, "I'm just interested in people on the edges. I feel an affinity for people who haven't had the best breaks in society. What I want to do more than anything is acknowledge their existence".
== Photography career ==
Mark became a unit photographer on movie sets, shooting production stills for films including Arthur Penn's Alice's Restaurant (1969), Mike Nichols' Catch-22 (1970), Carnal Knowledge (1971) and Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979) among her earliest. For Look magazine, she photographed Federico Fellini shooting his film Satyricon (1969). Mark has since photographed on the sets of more than 100 movies, up through at least director Baz Lurhmann's Australia (2008).
Mark has contributed to publications including the magazines Life, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, and Vanity Fair. 
== Partial Bibliography ==
*1974 The Photojournalist: Two Women Explore the Modern World and the Emotions of Individuals - with Annie Leibovitz
== External Links ==
*MaryEllenMark.com
*Mary Ellen Mark's Portfolio at Trish South Management
*Scotsman newspaper interview, June 2005
*Audio interview, The Digital Journalist, March 1999
*Video interview, Charlie Rose, January 31, 2000
Category:List of Photographers