[Leica] My memories of Mary Ellen Mark

[Lluis Ripoll]

+1
Lluis

El 27/05/2015, a les 17.04, Jim Nichols <jhnichols at lighttube.net> va escriure:

> 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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>> 
> 
> 
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