The great photographer Mary Ellen Mark, who died on Monday at the age of seventy-five, was fierce in her love of photography. Her love extended to the people she worked with: to her staff, her subjects, her students, and the other photographers in her life. Loyalty was one of her essential qualities. Once she embraced a person, that person became a part of her life. Magazine assignments, for her, were not finished after publication. They continued, and took on new lives as books, videos, or films. She never stopped photographing the disadvantaged, and the empathy that she felt toward her subjects made her an exquisite portrait photographer. One of the earliest assignments I worked with her on at The New Yorker was a portrait of Coretta Scott King, strong and respectful. Later, we commissioned her to spend a year taking photographs on the streets of New York City. I don’t think of Mary Ellen as someone who took funny pictures, but some of the images from that series still make me smile. Her commitment to her work and to the way that she worked—using analog photography, without compromise—never stopped. She worked, taught, gave it her all until yesterday. I’ll miss her.
