[Leica] My memories of Mary Ellen Mark

[Jim Nichols]

Kyle,

That is an incredible tribute to Mary Ellen Mark, and it should be very 
useful as a set of standards for all of us.

Thanks for taking time to post this.

Jim Nichols
Tullahoma, TN USA

On 5/27/2015 9:44 AM, kyle cassidy wrote:
> 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.
>
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