Mary Ellen Mark

Overview

If the Biennale's photographic offerings haven't quite quenched your thirst, have a look into Head On Photo Festival, starting with this black-and-white series by influential American photographer Mary Ellen Mark.

Spying into the rituals of different cultures, micro-communities and quirky individuals, her work is imbued with both humour and sadness. Mark's global roaming photography typically depicts people living on the margins of society. From the outskirts of Los Angeles to the back streets of Redfern, these searing images are poignant reminders of the vast gulf between prosperity and poverty.

Hosted by Stills Gallery, this is Mark’s Australian debut. However, the collection includes a few Sydney-based photographs, dating back to the 1980s. One work portrays a boxer stamped with prison tattoos with a hardened-looking manager hovering behind. It’s a rare glimpse into a working-class scene teeming with booze, blokes and boxing. Another photograph is closer to a studio sitting, revealing an almost identical pair of Greek bridesmaids solemnly positioned side-by-side. With fluffy perms and gaudy gowns, they are a comical vision of '80s excess. It seems Mark is mapping Australia’s growing multiculturalism. In most of these photographs, the intent gaze of the camera is met by the unflinching gaze of the subject.

Mark also turns her lens toward a variety of US locales. Here we have another spread of battlers. For instance, there’s The Damm Family in their Car, depicting a Los Angeles tribe huddled together in a self-conscious tableaux. The staging is more transparent in this image, the downward perspective intensifying their isolation and vulnerability. There’s also a young South Carolina girl standing in a paddle pool, cigarette in hand. Exhaling smoke towards the camera, she looks like a pageant queen with a bit of rough sass. With her smudged make-up and shiny swimwear, there is an air of premature sexuality. It is portraits such as these that verge on the bizarre, exposing a social underbelly that presents itself otherwise.

Behind the closed doors of suburbia, Mark captures a host of eccentric characters. Some of which are quite amusing and life-affirming. For example, there’s the joyous image of senior citizens in flapper dresses caught mid-Samba at a club in Miami. Further afield, there are a number of portraits revolving around an Indian circus troupe, featuring contortionists and animal tamers, on and off duty.

It seems that for Mark, eye contact is the reservoir of emotional affect. The penetrating gaze held by these subjects often seems to reveal information beyond the image itself. Importantly, the level perspective between camera and subject creates an egalitarian relationship that prevents the series from tipping into cliched sympathies.