A Three-Volume Book Becomes a Testament to Mary Ellen Mark’s Career
The late photographer, who left behind more than two million images, spent her life in search of the elusive iconic frame.
Mary Ellen Mark,
Photobooks - January 26, 2021
“Mary Ellen would never have made this book,” Martin Bell, Mary Ellen Mark’s husband and collaborator of more than thirty years, writes in an essay accompanying
The Book of Everything, the three-volume collection of the photographer’s life’s work recently published by Steidl.
After Mark died at age seventy-five, in 2015, Bell imagined a book that would truly encompass the “everything” of her tremendous output, including her photographs of children in China, Chicago, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, and North Carolina; of circus performers and teenage runaways; of sex workers in Mumbai; and of film sets and drag queens and coal-mining families and twins and celebrities. The result is an affecting testament to the vast scope of Mark’s vision and to the immersive devotion with which she approached the people she photographed.