‘A Lot of People to Live With’: Dyadic Departures in Mary Ellen Mark’s Pursuit of Faces in Tandem

Abstract

Just-Killed Epilogue as On-the-Rebound Prologue (in lieu of an abstract)

Call me naïve to be shocked when the following article was killed by fiat just as it was poised to be published in a Mary Ellen Mark catalogue accompanying C/O Berlin’s fall 2023 one-person show of her photography, Encounters (16 September 2023–18 January 2024). I should have been better prepared after one friend familiar with C/O Berlin doubted after reading my draft that they would publish anything insufficiently laudatory. Thus forewarned, I was especially pleased by the initial positive response of C/O curators to the text I submitted three months ahead of press time. They warned me they were on a tight schedule and precisely because I like the idea of mixing up a predictably laudatory monograph with a more reflective essay, I made a point of meeting every request for cuts and revisions.

Given my determined hoop-jumping, I thought all was going swimmingly when we had passed the official deadline of 1 July for submission to Steidl and they already had wired their fee to my bank. Then, on 10 July, an email appeared on my laptop titled ‘bad news’ – I would be happy to quote it verbatim except that might open me to suit. In so many words, the message explained that when the curatorial team very recently submitted the entire typeset text to the Mary Ellen Mark Foundation, they encountered strong objections to my essay. They allowed that if they were not pressed for time to have a catalogue in hand by the September opening, there might be compromises. But up against the deadline – for some reason they had not mentioned back in April that this ultimately would get vetted by the photographer’s foundation on which they depended for prints and use of reproduction, and strangely they only sought final approval just before going to press even though they had a draft of my text much earlier – they resolved to simply axe the essay and hoped that the writer’s fee already wired to my bank would now serve as a kill fee.

When I asked for more details about the Foundation’s objection that my essay had too many factual errors, the comments I was shown, except for one minor issue, consisted of protests to my interpretations. I had hardly concealed my judgements, but I also thought I had given clear reasons for them. I also thought that some readers might be impressed that I not only considered the work seriously, but also, after starting off questioning Mark’s self-described documentary mantle, I ultimately conceded a documentary attribute to Mark’s doubled portraits. Clearly the Foundation folks could tolerate no criticism of work or approach by their hallowed subject. In an era when censorship seems to rise to epidemic proportions, I resolved to find an alternative platform.

I have been on a portrait kick lately and I happen to think that this text makes a useful companion essay, if arguably somewhat contradictory, to one I researched, wrote and actually had published during the pandemic period of enforced isolation.¹ It remains my hope that followers of photography and contemporary image-making might have access to more than hagiographic cant that foundations controlling rights to reproduction seem to foster. I like to think this article offers a salutary attempt to take photographic portraiture seriously but with none of the rhetoric of idealised revelations that gloss the transaction initiated usually by the photographer. We hardly need more reflexive affirmations that already gild the photographic pantheon. If my article generates public refutation as well as expansions on these ideas, all the better. In my opinion, photographic discourse could use more bite and less balm to counter the hoary rhetoric of photographic pictures being either a universal language or the proverbial equivalent of a thousand words.

Keywords:

• Mary Ellen Mark (1940–2015)
• photographers’ estates
• copyright

Notes

1 – Sally Stein, ‘The Cons and Pros of Portraiture in Contemporary Art Discourse and Practice’, in 2022 O Retrato/On Portraiture (2022), 79–92, 〈https://repositorio.ul.pt/handle/10451/54999〉.

2 – Mark makes this double claim in the opening sentences of her book Twins (New York: Aperture, 2003), np. For the last book the photographer prepared before her death, see Mary Ellen Mark, On the Portrait and the Moment (New York: Aperture, 2015).

3 – The photographer’s archive contains one portrait of Brando with a beetle (1000C-103-005). The portrait of Burton with a squirrel occupies a double page in Mark’s final book of 2015, with another double page for Brando with a dragonfly; see Mark, On the Portrait, 50–51, 54–55.

4 – Ibid., 17.

5 – Ibid., 26–27, 28–29, 34–35.

6 – Mark, Twins, np.

7 – Joan A. Friedman, Twins in Session: Case Histories in Treating Twinship Issues (Los Angeles: Rocky Pines Press, 2018), 9.

8 – Mark’s portrait of the very young Schultz twins costumed as bride and groom is easily retrieved online 〈https://www.maryellenmark.com/books/twins/images/c4b37978-2636-4a7c-b708-2f590ad2c1b1〉. On superstitious associations of twins with incest, see Penelope Farmer, Two, or The Book of Twins and Doubles: An Autobiographical Anthology (London: Virago, 1996), 130. Farmer’s anthology, which appeared only a few years before Mark’s first trip to Twins Day, made a survey of such literature readily accessible to anyone like Mark who found the subject compelling.

9 – Mark, Twins, 90, large print of the double set of married twins in the unpaginated front section and reproduced small scale with excerpted interview; also 〈https://www.maryellenmark.com/books/twins/images/70e37967-2cc4-4551-b5aa-c0b49d3f8d45〉.

10 – For easiest retrieval of Mark’s portrait of John Reiff holding a framed photograph of his deceased twin Bill plus excerpted transcribed interview with the surviving twin, see online 〈https://www.maryellenmark.com/books/twins/images/0b9e0cb4-bdff-4f5e-89ce-f3aff0a9a236〉. The interview excerpt plus small-scale reproduction of the portrait is also found in the only paginated, final section of Mark, Twins, 90; and audio recordings of many interviews in the seventeen-minute film also titled Twins directed by Martin Bell, the photographer’s husband, and Susan Griak, produced by Mark (Greene House Studio, 2003).

11 – Respective interview excerpts with pregnant twin and then young Preston twins in the final paginated section of Mark, Twins, 8788, accompanying thumbnail reproductions of the portraits that are reproduced full page in the otherwise unpaginated book: as Mark, Twins is unpaginated, this photograph of the twins pair with one pregnant is most easily retrieved along with the interview excerpt online 〈https://www.maryellenmark.com/books/twins/images/17c2fb60-2ee3-4073-8438-5818c4834adf〉. Likewise, her portrait of the Preston Twins may be studied online 〈https://www.maryellenmark.com/books/twins/images/ca74bfb6-68e7-49e7-acae-c01f02a96772〉.

12 – Thanks to Ina Steiner for pointing out the work and book by Jun Fugiyasa, DZ: Dizygotic Twins (Miyagi: Shiogama Photo Festival, 2008); and to Susan Meiselas for directing me to Carrie Will’s disenchanted self-portraits with her twin sister.

13 – The photograph of the Merriweather twin nurses with their twin charges Bruce and Brian Kuzak is reproduced with additional commentary by Mark in On the Portrait, 68–69; the image may also be studied in Mark’s online archive 〈https://marianneboeskygallery.com/exhibitions/235/works/artworks-5394-mary-ellen-mark-bruce-and-brian-kuzak-with-their-nurses-teresa-2001/〉.

14 – For Mark’s 1984 colour photograph from her photographic essay on Camp Goodtimes, see 〈https://www.maryellenmark.com/books/the-photo-essay/images/4bb33cb4-5a17-4d26-adcb-d1cd5b47ca30〉.

15 – The Bergen portrait is reproduced in Mark, On the Portrait, 67; and is also retrievable from Mark’s online archive 〈https://www.maryellenmark.com/books/mary-ellen-mark/images/db11266e-4826-4fb2-bc11-d4de2a5c8340〉.

16 – Mark as quoted in Vicki Goldberg, ‘The Unflinching Eye: Photojournalist Mary Ellen Mark’, New York Times, 12 July 1987, 〈https://www.nytimes.com/1987/07/12/magazine/the-unflinching-eye-photojournalist-mary-ellen-mark.html〉.

17 – For one synoptic account with an extensive bibliography of Bowlby’s writings and those who extended his attachment theories and practices, see David J. Wallin, Attachment in Psychotherapy (New York: Guilford Press, 2007).

Additional information

Funding

For long-distance encouragement in a period of pandemic isolation, thanks to Deborah Cohen, Judith Crawley, Edward Gruberg, Pamela Hort, Annetta Kapon, Susan Meiselas, Robert Moeller, Ellen Nasper, Katherine Niemela, Ann Northrup, Mary Panzer, Grant Roemer, Stephanie Schwartz, Ina Steiner and Brian Wallis.