Wonderful, yet disturbing interview: Mary Ellen Mark

One of the first books I bought as a budding photographer was "Passport" by Mary Ellen Mark. I was blown away. Still am. These images are so powerful, so technically well done and I wanted to recreate that power in my images. I worked exclusively in black and white, TriX, normal lens kind of things.

It has been interesting to me that this type of work is seemingly less seen in the magazines and only seen in the book arena.

This is a long interview, (hat tip Steve D), and you may feel a sense of loss as the work that Mark does seems to be going the way of the dodo bird as we keep looking for cooler shots of Paris Hilton or Trump.

Listen to it all...

The Connection.org : Photographer Mary Ellen Mark: " The photographer Mary Ellen Mark insists that 'reality is always extraordinary.' For more than forty years, she has been focusing her lens on the gritty, and often unattractive reality of people who inhabit the seamier side of society. Her first in-depth project took her to the Oregon State Mental Hospital where she spent more than a month living with female inmates.

Her decision to immerse herself in her subject matter is a trademark of her work. Whether it is the red light district of Bombay, or working with street kids in Seattle, or a homeless family in Los Angeles, Mark captures the intimate, the disturbing and the unexpected on film.

But Mark says that our interest in these picture is disappearing. All we want, she says, are the glossy, celebrity shots".