ART REVIEW : An Overview of Life’s Underbelly

The mark of a great photographer is a clear vision--philosophical and technical--and Mary Ellen Mark is one of those rare documentary artists who knows her calling. Known best as a photojournalist whose work has appeared in publications such as Life, Vanity Fair and the Times of London, the extraordinary quality of her prints comes both from their beautifully clear compositions and from their consistent sense of purpose.

Mark works from the heart, and she unabashedly exhibits her empathy. Because she often shoots marginal people, her work has been compared to that of Diane Arbus, but Mark is very different. Whether doing portraits or environmental photos, the work is never aloof; Mark is clearly involved with her subjects in deeply compassionate ways. Her pictures of circus performers, street kids, heroin addicts and institutionalized lepers equally avoid sentimentalism and sensationalism in favor of human dignity.

“Mary Ellen Mark: 25 Years,” an exhibition of 125 black-and-white works, is the 52-year-old artist’s first major retrospective. Organized by the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y., this show at the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego covers a range of subjects that is often startling. It includes portraits of both the noble and ignoble--from Mother Teresa in her Missions of Charity in Calcutta to neo-Nazis at an Aryan Nations Congress in Idaho. In most cases the subjects face the camera, sometimes warily, sometimes arrogantly, but often comfortably. There is nothing covert or slice-of-life about the images. Mark works with the consent of her subjects, and she clearly has a way with people.

One reason may be that she doesn’t appear to judge. In a shocking image from 1971 titled “Husband and Wife, Harlan County, Kentucky,” a couple face the camera: He crouches on the stump of a tree, she stands beside him. He has a revolver pointed at her temple. She seems entirely calm, unafraid, even untroubled. It is a testament to the fact that some wives can adjust to just about any kind of situation. And to the fact that sometimes both husband and wife will openly reveal their true situation, even to a stranger.

The unabashed rapport is evident in Mark’s many pictures of street people, particularly the children. In three striking images from very different sites, Mark shows very young kids smoking. Dragging on their butts, they look vulnerable, simultaneously old and young, but invariably trying to be older than they are. One of these, a girl named Lillie, clutches her hand-crocheted doll--a vestige of her quickly fading childhood.

Of such encounters, Mark says in the catalogue published for the show: “You have to let them live their lives, that’s their right. You can’t be a disciplinarian and force people into a lifestyle they don’t want. As terrible as you might feel their lives are--and maybe they are that terrible--it’s their lives. You have to respect it for what it is, I think. If the readers send them money because of the article, great. You can tell them that it may be stupid to go out and spend their money on drugs, or whatever, but it’s their money.”

Such respect for her subjects must cost her, at times. Repeatedly she enters asylums for the insane and hospices for the dying. Homes for blind children and streets laden with glue addicts or heroin pushers. She has looked at the underbelly of London; Khartoum, Sudan; Calcutta, India; South Dallas, Tex.; Seattle, and elsewhere. But when she shows a group of young blind boys enjoying a shower or of blind girls examining a sighted infant, she is not showing pain. Often the works show strength, sometimes joy. On occasion, love.

The exhibition is divided into four loosely defined categories, “Confinement,” “On the Edge,” “Portraits” and “Indian Circus.” There is much overlap between them, and for the most part the categories seem superfluous, an attempt to divide a cohesive whole into parts that don’t need to be delineated. The last group is the most clearly defined. In 1989, Mark received a grant that allowed her to make two three-month trips to India, to travel with 16 different itinerant circuses.

Mark documents the performers’ agility and their playfulness. She photographs the animals in costume and the acrobats and trainers in their off hours. With the same sharp focus of all her work, she shows some pretty funny moments. A couple of circus “cowboys” posing with their guns. A trainer in leather studs standing with his elephant, whose trunk is wrapped around the trainer’s neck like a piece of jewelry.

Probably the least important work in the show is a group of celebrity portraits. It is not that these works are not beautiful--they are. But despite their candidness, these pictures are of people used to being photographed. They lack the innocence and freshness of many of the other works.

That is a small bone to pick with a near-perfect show.

“Mary Ellen Mark: 25 Years” continues at the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego’s Balboa Park through Jan . 31. Museum hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily. Admission is $3. For information, call (619) 239-5262.