‘Indian Circus’ Comes to Town : An exhibit by photojournalist Mary Ellen Mark shows the innocence that survives amid grimmer aspects of life in the Asian nation

India has never bored Mary Ellen Mark. She has returned often since 1969, when she first aimed her cameras at the exhilarating swirl of India’s beauty and culture, its tangle of poverty, joy and hopelessness.

“I feel very at home there,” Mark said. “In a strange way, it’s where I belong.”

Her photographs of India have done much to define a career often focused on the world’s darker edges: Mother Teresa’s efforts with the poor and the dying in Calcutta, prostitutes in Bombay, children suffering from river blindness and leprosy. The country “puts you through everything, both visually and emotionally,” Mark said. “All your senses are activated.”

Mark, 51, also found an innocence there during that first trip two decades ago as she watched an Indian circus. In front of her lumbered a huge trained hippopotamus whose entire act was to walk around in a tutu and eat cotton candy. That image stayed with Mark, finally leading in 1989 and ’90 to a long-simmering personal project to document the Indian circuses.

Those pictures--some of grim-faced animal trainers and angelic contortionists--are on display at the Fahey/Klein Gallery through Jan. 11. “Indian Circus” is the photographer’s first major solo exhibit in Los Angeles.

The day after the show’s opening this month, Mark stood in the gallery’s main room, where some of the exhibition’s 43 large platinum prints were scattered evenly along the walls. A long braid of dark hair swung against the back of her slim frame. And she stopped at the image of a bear wearing a dress, rolling an eye toward the camera in apparent resignation while standing strangely upright between two trainers. “He looks a little embarrassed, doesn’t he?”

Some of the pictures here are composed of awkward but expressive angles--for example, a tilted horizon in a photograph of a small clown with two straight-faced sharpshooters in cowboy outfits. Others appear as more formal portraiture even as Mark captures an expression of spontaneous pride and grace.

Variations on this same aggressive visual style are found throughout her new book, “Mary Ellen Mark: 25 Years” (Bulfinch; $60), which coincides with a traveling career retrospective that opened earlier this year at New York’s International Center of Photography. The book and traveling exhibit both include a large section of “Indian Circus” pictures.

“It’s a midlife retrospective,” she said. “I hope I have a lot more years ahead of me to do more and more work. But in a way I’m glad I did this now. It’s a way for me to look at what I’ve done so far, just to see where I am, and what direction I want to go in. The most important thing is what’s ahead.”

At the Fahey/Klein Gallery, a small rear room is devoted to some of Mark’s older photographs, including excerpts from her photo-essays about runaways on the streets of Seattle, disturbed women locked within the Oregon State Hospital, and Mother Teresa’s work in India. It’s a history that gallery owner David Fahey said makes her “one of the great American photojournalists.”

At Life magazine, where Mark’s work has often appeared, picture editor David Friend said Mark regularly displays “a versatility rarely matched in the photo committee.” Just in the past 10 years, he said, Mark has “covered everything from Dustin Hoffman dressing up as ‘Tootsie’ to a week in the life of a homeless family.”

“She has an uncanny ability to capture the uncanny,” Friend added. “And it’s particularly evident in the circus pictures. I think a lot of it is because she looks at life as a carnival. She has a passion for life, and it comes out in her pictures.”

Mark said she never wanted to be anything but a photographer once she first picked up a camera in 1962, while studying art at the University of Pennsylvania. Soon enough, the young photographer was showing her portfolio to Edward Steichen, the pioneering art photographer, who was by then well into his 80s. He told her, as she now tells students at her occasional workshops, that any serious photographer must have a unique point of view.

On the walls of Mark’s SoHo apartment are prints by such influences as W. Eugene Smith, Robert Frank and Diane Arbus, all photographers whose most important work was shot in black and white. It’s the same quality that first intrigued Mark about photography, she said. Most of her pictures, including “Indian Circus,” are black and white, a medium she said does not distract from the content of her images.

Consequently, she often works to persuade magazine editors to allow her to use black and white. None of her color work is included in her new book.

“There’s something about the abstraction of black and white, of bringing things down to their essentials, that works for me,” she said. “There’s just something more lasting about the images. They convey more emotions to me.”

Her search for human expression and drama took her back and forth to India last year; she would spend three months at a time in the country, photographing 18 circuses.

“I’m real tough on myself, so a project is a big deal for me,” she said. “It takes me a long time to figure out how to finance it and to go do it. Those things don’t come along every day.

“I think they really enjoyed being photographed,” she said, speaking of her subjects. “After all, they’re performers. They love the attention and recognition. The complicated thing was to logistically work out how to travel, where to go, and talk to the owners to make sure they trusted me and would let me go into the circus.

“I’ve worked in tough neighborhoods in this country, and winning the access is hard. You have to get to know people, and they have to trust you and allow you into their territory.”

Winning an animal’s trust can be even more difficult, as Mark’s husband, filmmaker Martin Bell, discovered while videotaping a friendly chimpanzee. Another chimp, a large 8-year-old named Shiva, who apparently hated blond-bearded men, attacked Bell from behind and bit him on the face and finger.

Later, Bell tried to make friends with Shiva, who was the circus owner’s favorite chimpanzee. Shiva would only reluctantly take Bell’s gift of candy, and only with a sideways glance. “I never got a good picture of Shiva, because I was scared of him. He was the dominant chimp, working his way up to be the boss chimp. And he was frightening,” Mark said, laughing. “Everyone was scared of Shiva.”

Mark said plans are now under way to make a film about life in the Indian circus, directed by Bell and written by novelist John Irving. The movie, titled “Son of the Circus,” would also allow Mark another chance to photograph the circus, possibly to create enough pictures for a separate book on the subject.

“The older I get, the more I feel that technically I can realize what I want to do,” Mark said. “I think you’re constantly still searching. I don’t ever want to feel that I’m there, that I’ve reached it and there’s nowhere else to go.”

“Indian Circus,” an exhibition of photographs by Mary Ellen Mark, continues through Jan. 11 at the Fahey/Klein Gallery, 148 N. La Brea Ave. For more information, call (213) 934-2250.