Words Cannot Express…

Kodak Lecture Series: Mary Ellen Mark



By Lianna Shen
October 3, 2007

After a day of filming in Regent Park on the coldest day of September, I really didn’t feel like going to a lecture. To be honest, I’ve never been much of a photographer, and I really didn’t think listening to someone talk about photography was really my kind of thing.

But I went, and since there were no seats left, a couple of colleagues and I sneaked through and sat in a dark corner of the auditorium, pen and paper in hand, waiting for Mary Ellen Mark to speak.

I did not write one word on that piece of paper, because words cannot describe what one feels from a photo.

Proms. Twins. Circus freaks. Everything was shown in black and white, and every photo had at least one human face. It was the faces that told the stories.

There was one photo of an impoverished family squatting in the mountains somewhere in the United States. In the picture, three family members are spooning each other under rag blankets. The son is behind his father, the daughter in front.


The father is holding the little girl close, eyes closed, like a lover. The girl’s eyes are staring into the camera, and you can just see that something is very wrong.


Some things are very hard to write about because words can only describe reality. A picture, on the other hand, can show exactly what needs to be said.

Writing and reporting about Regent Park can be pretty straightforward if you stick to the organizations, after school programs, and city politics. But just being in Regent Park – seeing the dirty curtains hanging crooked, hearing the half dozen foreign languages being spoken – makes it pretty obvious that the real stories here, are not found in an acronym.

The real stories are inside those characterless brick buildings. They are with the people who make up the Regent Park community. And some of the stories might be pretty hard to tell.

A camera doesn’t ask questions. It doesn’t hold a pen and paper and it doesn’t record quotations. All it does is point and shoot. It can report up close from far away. This is convenient when subjects are not willing to talk – or if they simply cannot communicate in English.

On the other hand, photos alone sometimes ache for textual accompaniment. Mark’s collection entitled “Twins” features identical twins from all over the world. And while it is quite striking to see two identical beings, side by side, over and over again, their lives is what makes them even more intriguing. Mark would give little snippets of information about each pair of twins – some were married to other twins, others wanted to die together - suddenly these twins were not just objects of photography, but instead, characters.


Luckily the online medium has fewer restrictions than tangible mediums like print. You can link to a photo gallery, complete with captions, to tell even more of your story. There is a lot of freedom when it comes to word limit, because you are working with a multi-layer layout, instead of a flat panel. It is the perfect medium for reporting on something like Regent Park, because Regent Park is not something that can be talked about in a one-page expose. It is an intricate community, in need of in-depth storytelling. You can’t do that with only words, and pictures alone cannot say enough.

Photos from http://www.photoeye.com/templates/mShowDetailsbycat.cfm?Catalog=PI150