Bringing together dozens of photographs that span the breadth of Mary Ellen Mark's career, Girlhood at The National Museum for Women in The Arts highlights the special focus she paid to girls and young women living in a diverse array of social and economic circumstances across the globe. The photographs on view underscore Mark's observational approach to working with her subjects, in that she rarely intervened or directed them in how to pose or behave. Instead, she strove to photograph them as they were and as they wished to be.
Growing up in Pennsylvania, Mark took an interest in photography at a young age, first picking up a camera at age nine. Her training and education culminated at the University of Pennsylvania, where she received a master’s degree in photojournalism from the institution’s Annenberg School for Communication in 1964. In 1965, she won a Fulbright Scholarship to photograph in Turkey for one year, an honor that Mark describes as “the beginning of my life’s photographic journey.” While Mark built a reputation as a photojournalist, contributing photo essays and portraits to publications such as Life, the New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair and the New York Times Magazine, her work has also been widely exhibited in galleries and museums around the globe.
