Biography provided by Focal press
 
Mark is among an elite group of photographers known around the world for her incisive style of documentary work that is both engaging and sensitive. Her subjects often seem exotic or unusual but Mark cultivates an intimate quality in the pictures that renders familiarity without diminishing the very human circumstances of the people in front of her camera. Before earning an MA (1965) in photojournalism at the University of Pennsylvania, Mark had bought her first Leica and had already traveled on a Fulbright grant to Turkey and later, India. By 1969 she had assignments doing production stills for films like Satyricon with Fellini. Her work has been published in Look, LIFE, Time, New York Times Magazine, Vogue, and Vanity Fair, only to name a few among a hundred periodicals. She was a member of Magnum from 1977 to 1981. High-quality book publications have been a major goal of Mark's involvement with defined subcultures in society for almost three decades. Featured among these are teenage drug users in Seattle, women in a mental hospital, prostitutes in India, Mother Teresa, circus performers, and more recently, sets of identical twins (using Polaroid 20 24). A characteristic of Mark's considerable talent is her ability to form a trusting relationship with her subjects to provide viewers with a compassionate, first-person encounter — almost as if Mark is a surrogate for the general public who would never otherwise have such privileged access to these vital human dramas. The emotions and intellects that Mark has affected with her photographic oeuvre is truly one of the outstanding contributions to the history of the medium.
 
(Author: KW)
 
Michael Peres (Editor-in-Chief), 2007, Focal Encyclopedia of Photography, 4th edition, (Focal Press) [ISBN-10: 0240807405, ISBN-13: 978-0240807409] (Used with permission)
 
Approved biography
Courtesy of the Victoria & Albert Museum (London, UK)
 
After studying painting and art history and gaining an MA in photojournalism from the University of Pennsylvania, Mary Ellen Mark started her career as a freelance photojournalist in the mid 1960s.
 
In 1965 she was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to photograph in Turkey. There Mark established her signature style of combining a documentary approach with a fascination with the bizarre. She also established one of the key themes in her work: an interest in children acting like adults.
 
Returning to America in 1967, Mark moved to New York and worked as a photojournalist, publishing photo-stories in magazines such as the New York Times, Evergreen and Life. Mark also worked on film sets, taking production stills on films including Catch 22 and One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest. Mark's first solo exhibition, Ward 81, was a result of her work on the latter, when she returned to the high-security women's mental hospital where it had been filmed.
 
An interest in people, especially women, on the edge of society is apparent throughout her work. Her projects include a series on prostitutes in Bombay's Falkland Road (1978), street kids in Seattle (1983) and a study of Indian travelling circuses (1989). Mark continues to publish and exhibit her work to great acclaim and in 2001 was awarded the Cornell Capa Infinity Award from the International Center for Photography, New York.
 
This biography is courtesy and copyright of the Victoria & Albert Museum and is included here with permission.
 
Wikipedia
 
Mary Ellen Mark (March 20, 1940 - May 25, 2015) was an American photographer known for her photojournalism, documentary photography, portraiture, and advertising photography. She photographed people who were "away from mainstream society and toward its more interesting, often troubled fringes". Mark had 21 collections of her work published, most notably Streetwise and Ward 81. Her work was exhibited at galleries and museums worldwide and widely published in Life, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, New York Times, and Vanity Fair. She was a member of Magnum Photos between 1977 and 1981. She received numerous accolades, including three Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards, three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the 2014 Lifetime Achievement in Photography Award from the George Eastman House and the Outstanding Contribution Photography Award from the World Photography Organisation.