About This Photographer:
Mary Ellen Mark is an American photographer best known for her portraiture, photojournalism and advertising work. Mark focuses most of her work on children, exploring themes such as homelessness, addiction, prostitution etc. often combining the two together as she often captures 'real life' in poorer and third-world countries. I picked Mary Ellen Mark as a photographer to research because I like the obscurity of the themes of her work, and I believe I can relate this to Contrasts as I too can explore the way younger people are seen to do grown-up things and vice-versa.
Why Have I Picked This Photographer?
I have picked this photographer because I enjoy her interesting take on the theme of Contrasts. Instead of looking a the obvious, she uses people and emotions as her muse and I for one would definitely like to look at some of her photos for inspiration on my own work. Based in America, she travels the country a lot exploring mostly areas that are slightly poorer and less built-up than bigger cities such as New York and LA. Because she travels a lot, she gets to interact with a lot of interesting characters which has allowed her to really play with emotions, which is something I would definitely like to take a core focus on for my personal project. Not only does she explore the contrast in emotions, but she always shoots in black and white, which is also a more-obvious contrast.
Evaluation:
I like the use of black and white in most images, but I think that with this particular image, it helps to make the tone and emotion of this photo all the more disturbing. This photo has a really powerful message for viewers, no matter what angle they try to perceive it from. It purely depicts the story we see in society all the time; the skinny 'cool' girl taller and more powerful than fat, poor people in society. This photo screams bullying to me; the pose of the standing girl - smoking - depicts someone you would see in society anywhere in the world, thinking that they are cooler and better than anyone else. She's slim, and wearing a nicer costume, whilst the girl sitting down in the pool, suggests she feels inferior to the other girl - because of her weight? She's also not wearing a swimsuit, which suggests that perhaps her family don't have the money to afford those sort of clothes, but does that make the other girl a better person? No. Whilst the subject of bullying is a disturbing subject in itself, the fact that these two girls are young CHILDREN, makes it even worse to look at, but at the same time it's quite clever and beautiful to look at as an image. The contrast here is that, bullying to this extent - especially with the girl smoking - DOES NOT happen in children this age. Yes they do get into little fights every now and then, but to make the girl sitting down feel the way that she's feeling would take some serious adult-like torment, which contrasts the idea of perhaps children acting like adults, and adults looking like children.
Because of stereotyping in this society, we automatically look at the man in this photo and see him as poor, perhaps even look at him as a criminal, purely because he has that 'look' about him. This particular stereotype is necessary however to understand the contrast present within the photo. With a criminal, they are associated with being rough, angry, and incapable of loving or caring for anything - but here you have the character delicately holding a tiny creature on his finger. This scenario is strangely very similar to this year's Celebrity Big Brother. Runner-up Abz Love, a member of the former group Five, entered the competition with a fairly negative reputation - all people saw was a man with a shaved head, loads of tattoos and a typical London-bad boy accent. He ended up coming second in the competition when 1. he revealed that he has the condition Asperger Syndrome and 2. because he really showed off how he connected with nature. Because of these bad stereotypes associated with people, when never get to learn their true characters, which is why I love this image because the contrast between reality and the stereotype helps to show us who they actually are.
Now, one of the greatest, most common fears for young children - and some adults - is clowns. I think this is a particularly strong image because of the sheer torment and disturbing tone it enlightens. The contrast between emotions here is also so strong, and would definitely inspire me to do a similar shoot with very similar characters. The use of a gun prop here also heightens the intensity of the tone because it almost makes the fear of clowns all the more realistic - usually it's just the creepy makeup that puts people off, but with the clown supposedly threatening to shoot the girl, the fear becomes a lot more serious. The pose of these two characters also makes the tone more serious because of the way the clown has his arm wrapped around her slightly, as if to suggest that he has total control and empowerment over her. Although a simple happy and sad emotion contrast would look quite powerful, the sheer exaggeration of the clown's 'happiness' and the girl's fear and pain makes this photo really striking and eye-catching. I would have however, perhaps, removed some of the black and white effect, and used selective colour to maybe draw out some of the red in the makeup of the clown to suggest blood, pain, anger etc.
Mary Ellen done a lot of travelling with circuses when photographing, which explains where the idea for this and the above photo originated from. Although that it is clear that the monkeys in this photo are just costumes, I do like the juxtaposition between human and animal life, and the idea that often dwarfs or other disabled people are compared to as freaks, or even in extreme cases, animals. What adds to the surrealism of this photo is the person/monkey on the right is holding a tiny little puppy in his arms, like any given human would hold a baby, this time comparing the idea of the animal and human world, rather than contrasting them. I think this photo is effective in showing the harsh reality of how people with disabilities are treated - these two people, just because they are short, are made to perform in silly outfits as part of a circus show - but why can't 'normal' people be expected to do this? I think looking at both the world of humans and animals, and ability and disability will be interesting topics to focus on for my personal project as the ideas both prove to shock the viewer.
Influence:
Although Mary Ellen's work is yet to specifically influence my work, I have begun to look into making plans for future shoots based on her work with emotions, especially those of children, and to also experiment with black and white photography. Although I don't want to make my work as controversial as Mary Ellen's, there are definitely some ideas I will be able to look at replicating myself, and I feel I will be able to make some really strong
contrasts within my work, such as contrasting child and adult behaviour, as well as animal and human behaviour too.
Summary:
This controversial photographer has been one of my most favourite photographers to research because I have never come across photography with such strong messages in a very long time. I like how her editing is very minimal, and for her it is all about the actual photograph itself and the codes and meanings that they hold, rather than how
pretty they look. I also think she is very clever for only ever photographing in black and white, or sometimes with a sepia filter, as this really helps to control the mood and tone of her work, and all of this I want to look into bringing into my own work.
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