[Leica] My memories of Mary Ellen Mark

[kyle cassidy]

I thought we’d have so much more time.


I wrote some things down last night.


(Click the link for the version with photos.
http://kylecassidy.livejournal.com/810008.html)


Mary Ellen Mark convinced me to buy a Leica. She was also the first person
who told me that my photographs were terrible. That was in 1999. I’d been
thinking for years that they were pretty good and I’d gotten a whole bunch
of gallery shows, but Mary Ellen tore them down and she was absolutely
right. I’ve learned over the years that criticism comes in two forms,
praise and growth, and there’s a time for each. Mary Ellen was the first
person whose criticism made me seriously grow as an artist. I’d learned
things that needed to be torn down and built up again. It's certainly true
that I wouldn't be where I am today without her influence.


I learned a lot from her, but primarily, I think, five things:

1) “No” means that you haven’t asked the right person. I was her assistant
in 1999 while she was teaching a documentary photography class and then
again in 2000 or 2001 (I forget). Students would go out and shoot during
the day, they'd drop off their film then we’d meet in the morning and go
over everybody’s photos. At the end of the first day she sent me out to a
local 1 hour lab to tell them we’d be dropping off a hundred or more rolls
of film at 5:00 and we needed them at 8:00 in the morning. The manager told
me they closed at 8:00pm and they’d be able to do a few by closing and the
rest sometime during the following day. I called Mary Ellen at her hotel
and told her and she said “no, that’s not how it’s going to happen. Find
the district manager and tell them we need this film processed printed and
returned by 8:00 am every day.” And that was it, she hung up. So I found
the district manager and the store stayed open until midnight every night
to process our film, I'd stay there waiting for it to be done and each
morning there was a review of the previous days photographs. It make me
realize that everything is negotiable.

2) Photography isn’t about f-stops and lenses, it’s about being able to
talk to people. Whether that’s saying “I’d like to make a photograph of
you” or “I’d like to get up on the roof of your building”, the technical
aspect of photography is only part of it, and it’s the easy part and many
times the least important part. It's really easy to accumulate a lot of
gear instead of working to be a better artist. She sent the students out to
street corners and told them to get someone to invite them into their house
to photograph them. The students made friends, they built relationships,
they got in people's lives and they produced amazing work. That was a huge
eye opener for me.

3) A photograph has to be able to stand on its own without text. You can
add text to a photo, but the photo itself has to be good enough that you’d
hang it on the wall if the caption was missing because some day it may
exist as an artifact without its context and when it's hanging on a wall
someone needs to be captivated by it in passing, without knowing any of the
back story. All of her photographs work like that. You don’t need to know
that someone’s a movie star or someone’s a prostitute or someone else just
won a mustache contest, they’re all beautiful images first. She did
enduring and beautiful portraits of celebrities and the same for people who
weren't. In the years before reality television she taught us that
everybody has a compelling story and everybody deserves the chance to have
their story told.

4) Leave decisions to the viewer, don’t editorialize in camera. People
shouldn’t be able to tell whether or not you like the person you’re
photographing, they should think only that your pictures are good. She made
me realize that people aren't cartoons. That nobody wakes up in the morning
thinking "Today I'm going to wreck the world" -- everybody wakes up
thinking that they're doing good.

5) Things are easier when you have a guide. I learned to look for someone
on the inside to make introductions for you. Finding the right person at
the start is important and can save you a lot of time. But Mary Ellen
didn't always do this herself, she had an amazing ability to just walk into
a place and be accepted. She has an amazing photo of a party at spring
break which I asked her about once. She said she was walking along the
beach and heard a party happening in an apartment, so she just walked in
and photographed the party -- AND she got everybody there to sign a model
release. I was always interested in her Behind the Scenes because how she
got the photos was often as unbelievable as the photos themselves.

As a photographer Mary Ellen was tenacious, as a person she was kind, and
as a mentor she was honest. She and her husband, filmmaker Martin Bell were
always generous to me, recommending me to magazines, plugging my books,
inviting me to parties and introducing me to people. (She would often
introduce me by saying: "This is the weirdest photographer you'll ever
meet. He's good, but he's weird. Aren't you?") In my office now there's a
giant box with a copy of the Bed Song Book in it addressed to them. It's
been sitting here for months. I kept thinking "ah, it's too heavy to carry
to the post office today." I'm sad she didn't get to see it, I'm sad I
thought she'd be around forever and that I acted like there'd always be
tomorrow. She did get to see my librarian portraits and I'm glad for that.

She cared about the people she photographed, maybe that's the most
important thing she taught me.