Heart of the People

By Maria Nguyen

"I just think it's important to be direct and honest with people about why you're photographing them and what you're doing. After all, you are taking some of their soul, and I think you have to be clear about that." -Mary Ellen Mark, "Mary Ellen Mark : 25 Years

For a photographer who has been working all over the world for over three decades, Mary Ellen Mark has a remarkable memory for people’s names and stories.

As she flipped through the digital slides during her lecture at Ryerson University last week, Mark recalled stories connected to each photograph as if she took them just yesterday.

Among them happy moments of American prom nights, powerful photos of prostitutes working in the Falkland Road brothels of Bombay, runaway children in Seattle, and poverty-stricken families in Los Angeles. In each one Mark managed to document her subjects in a way that are intimate and real.

Mark gets close to people, not only photographically but personally. She learns their stories, then takes their portraits. That’s why her photos are seemingly candid yet powerful. She takes the photos during odd and mundane moments we wouldn’t normally think make a good photo, resulting in this awkward, person-caught-off-guard feel.

In her biography, Mark talks about her motive for taking photos in such a way. "To touch on people's lives [ in a way they ] haven't been touched on before, it's fascinating." Mary Ellen Mark, "Mary Ellen Mark : 25 Years"

As journalists, that is how we ought to approach our subjects. We have to get to know them, catch them with their guard down, and choose an angle we don’t readily see on the surface. We also need to take great care to expose but not exploit the characters in our story.

Mark showed mainly work she did with the marginalized and who she called “otherwise forgotten” people. A lot of them were disabled children and poor families living in remote areas around the world.

It’s what we’re set out to do in covering Regent Park: focus on the people, give them a voice, whether it is through photographs, audio and video recordings, or all of the above.

If you were at the lecture or have ever seen Mark’s work, you would remember the detail of her portraits. Even when the composition is ordinary, the emotion is still intense. And it’s because she got close to her subjects.

Watch the Webcast of her lecture