Mary Ellen Mark

Mary Ellen Mark, Father and Son. Dallas, Texas,  1987

Mary Ellen Mark,  Las Vegas, 1991

Mary Ellen Mark, Christian Bikers, Arizona, 1988

Finding inspiration in the outer fringes of society, photographer Mary Ellen Mark is known for her highly humanistic images. Born in 1940 in Philadelphia, Mark attended the University of Pennsylvania earning a B.F.A in art history and painting and an M.A. in photojournalism. She has won numerous awards for her work, including the Cornell Capa Award from the International Center of Photography in 2001.

Mark has photographed a diverse range of subjects, including homeless families, Bombay prostitutes, Seattle runaways, drug addicts, and the sick.  Many of these images have been the basis  for books, including Streetwise (Aperture, 1992) and Ward 81 (Simon & Schuster, 1979). In stark contrast, Mark has also photographed actors and directors, shooting primarily on Hollywood movie sets. Most notable is her work on the set of  One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Apocalypse Now. Many of these images, intended for reproduction in periodicals, have earned Mark  recognition in the media world in addition to the art world. Shooting primarily in black and white, Mark provides the viewer a chance to look at other worlds outside their own.

William Safire and the Kitchen Debate

Associated Press, The Great Debate…U.S. Vice President Richard Nixon, in dark suit, gestures as he talks with Soviet Premier Khrushchev, left during their tour of American Exhibition in Moscow this summer, July 24, 1959

This Sunday, September 27, 2009, New York Times columnist William Safire died at the age of 79. Safire won a Pulitzer Prize for his critical political columns and was a speechwriter for President Richard Nixon. In 1959 Safire was the press agent for the exhibition where the so-called “Kitchen Debate” took place: a series of meetings between U.S. Vice President Richard Nixon and the Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev to discuss the merits of their respective economic systems. The first encounter took place on July 24, 1959, during the opening of the American National Exhibition at Sokolniki Park in Moscow. For the exhibition an entire house was built as a symbol to the comforts and advantages of the American way of living. Although the conversations between Nixon and Khrushchev were held throughout the whole house, the kitchen was the main location for their dialogue. This is where Safire documented the historical meeting. On July 24 2009, precisely 50 years after the event, Safire reflected on his experiences in his Op-Ed column for the New York Times.

In Memoriam: Christian Poveda, Photographer and Filmmaker

Christian Poveda, Fabricating explosives in “liberated zone,” Usulatán, October 1981

French-Spanish photographer and filmmaker Christian Poveda was killed in El Salvador, on September 2, 2009. Since the 1990s, Poveda had been documenting Salvadoran gang culture. His most recent film, La Vida Loca (2008), captures the violent lives of young members of the heavily tattooed Mara 18 gang.

Poveda first went to El Salvador in the early 1980s to cover the country’s decade-long civil war. His unflinching black-and-white images of the war were included in a 1983 ICP exhibition, El Salvador: Work of 30 Photographers. Following the exhibition’s initial presentation at ICP, it toured the U.S. for more than two years, raising awareness about the civil war, America’s role in the conflict, and its devastating toll on the Salvadoran people. In 2005, Poveda joined the other photographers in the exhibition in donating the works to the ICP Collection, creating a permanent archive of images of the war that is an invaluable resource for students and scholars.

When ICP remounted El Salvador: Work of 30 Photographers in 2005, we included a monument to three of the photographers in the exhibition who had lost their lives in the course of their work: Oliver Rebbot, John Hoagland, and Richard Cross. It is with great sadness that we add Christian’s name to that list.

65th Anniversary of D-Day

Robert Capa, [American soldiers landing on Omaha Beach, D-Day, Normandy, France], June 6, 1944

Although Capa’s D-Day photograph of a GI, Huston S. Riley, emerging from the surf (above) did not win a Pulitzer Prize, it and the rest of Capa’s D-Day coverage was chosen by New York University’s journalism department as the twentieth-seventh most distinguished works of twentieth-century American journalism. This pictorial essay beat out Joe Rosenthal’s Iwo Jima photograph as well as Capa’s own Spanish Civil War images.

Capa, assigned to the U.S. 1st Infantry Division, was part of the second group of the first wave of landings on Omaha Beach. According to Richard Whelan, Capa’s biographer, the photographer was carrying three cameras on June 6, 1944—two Contaxes and a Rolleiflex. He used the 35mm Contaxes to capture images of the beach invasion and only used the Rollei to document the preparations and aftermath of the attack. The film from all three cameras, including four rolls of 35mm film, were sent to London to be cleared by Army censors and then sent on to the Life offices in London. Working under extreme pressure, the magazine’s editors wanted to get the images into the June 19 issue of Life. In the rush, the lab assistant put all four rolls of 35mm film in the drying cabinet and turned up the heat. Unfortunately, the lack of air circulation caused the emulsion to melt off three of the four rolls. Only eleven images from the fourth roll remained; the slightly melted emulsion blurred the images and also made some of the sprocket holes visible, as seen in the third image above. None of the Rollei images were destroyed.

These and other amazing details about Capa’s D-Day adventures can be found in Whelan’s exhibition catalogue, This Is War! Robert Capa at Work.