Ward 81.
Marks, Mary Ellen. Ward 81. New York: Simon and Schuster, (1979).
Oblong 8vo.; illustrated throughout with black-and-white photographs; black remainder mark on top edge, as is usual; black cloth, stamped in gilt on spine; very slightly curled; pictorial dust jacket.
First edition.
One of the most haunting and explosive photobooks published in the late seventies, Mary Ellen Mark’s Ward 81 is now seen as part of an important movement of women photographing other women. Mark’s subjects were all patients in the infamous Ward 81, a ward for the treatment of mentally ill women at the Oregon State Mental Hospital deemed violent to themselves and others. Mark had asked director Milos Forman, with whom she had been working on Taking Off, if she could also shoot for his upcoming film, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The film, shot on location at the hospital, had no budget for a still photographer, so Mark worked for expenses only. As the filming proceeded, Mark established a relationship with the hospital’s director, who introduced her to the women of the institution’s maximum-security Ward 81. A year after production had wrapped, Marks and writer Karen Folger Jacobs were given permission to photograph and interview the women in Ward 81, where they spent a total of thirty-six days.
Ward 81 was Mark’s first sustained project, and was consciously produced in a format contrary to a traditional magazine story: consisting of a beginning, middle and an end. Instead, the goal was to get close to the women of Ward 81, to understand them as well as she could, and to give visual expression to the resulting connections felt by Mark. The final images—stark, gritty, and arresting—are powerful in and of themselves, and gave a voice to this marginalized group, carrying their story from the fringes to mainstream society, while elevating Mark’s status as one of the most gifted photographers of the 20th century. Robert Hughes, the art critic at Time magazine, wrote that Ward 81 was “a lamentation: one of the most delicately shaded studies of vulnerability ever set on film.”
Feminist issues form the nucleus of Mark’s career, so much so that she may be called the first truly feminist photographer. But her feminism is not so much political as humanist, an unflinching but sympathetic rendering of the sufferings of the disempowered female. Much of Mark’s work centers on marginalized women. In particular, her images portray the most extreme examples of females trapped in their circumstances because of their inability to overcome the obstacles placed before them by society.
Print Inquire
