‘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.