Seen Behind the Scene: with Mary Ellen Mark

Seen Behind the Scene: 40 years of Photography on the Set. The new book is her 17th, and likely her most commercial project ever, with vivid, bankable images of Jack Nicholson and Johnny Depp, Katharine Hepburn and Brad Pitt, and page after page of marquee-name superstars and film auteurs. Mark’s career is mostly dedicated to serious work, to pictures in a social context focused not on celebrity but on the “unfamous”: all the ignored runaways and working poor; the homeless and mentally ill; young lovers and the moms of the Aryan Nation. Over the years, she’s traveled often to India, photographed Mother Teresa, child prostitutes and the Indian circus. And she’s funded some of these projects by working as a still photographer on movie sets, beginning with the hippie melodrama Alice’s Restaurant in 1969. Soon, she was capturing the poetic sweep of Fellini’s posture as he barked into a megaphone on the nighttime set of Satyricon, or hiking with Francois Truffaut and Catherine Deneuve in the snowy French Alps for La Sirène du Mississippi. Read more.