CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/14/2023

ICP presents Melissa Harris and Dr. Karen Folger Jacobs on the reissue of 'Mary Ellen Mark: Falkland Road'

Saturday, October 14, from 1–2 PM, International Center of Photography and Steidl will celebrate the reissue of Mary Ellen Mark's seminal photobook, Falkland Road: Prostitutes of Bombay—featuring a revised sequence and scans of the original 35mm Kodachromes—and dive further into Mark's work through a special screening of the film Ward 81: Voices, a gripping documentary about Mark’s time documenting the Oregon State Hospital, a psychiatric facility she first encountered while doing set photography for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Dr. Karen Folger Jacobs, who worked alongside Mark in the ward, will join Melissa Harris, curator of the new retrospective Mary Ellen Mark: Encounters, on view at C/O Berlin, for remarks and Q&A after the film, followed by a book reception in the ICP shop.

Featured photograph is from Falkland Road.

About the Book
On her first trip to India in 1968, Mary Ellen Mark visited Falkland Road, the notorious red-light area in Mumbai. She tried to photograph in the area yet was consistently met with hostility and aggression, both from the sex workers she sought to portray and the men who were their customers. Resilient, she returned in 1978 for a magazine assignment and over the course of six weeks she slowly began to make friends and finally entered the daily lives of these women: “I had no idea if I could do this,” she later recalled, “but I knew I had to try.” Mark’s portrait of Falkland Road is beautiful and shocking, remarkable for its intimate emotional power and visceral color. Falkland Road was initially published in 1981 and with additional photos in a 2005 Steidl edition; the book has long been recognized as one of her major bodies of work. Including Mark’s original introduction and captions as well the new photos of the 2005 book, this latest edition—with a revised sequence, and printed from scans of the original 35mm Kodachromes—is the truest expression of her insight into this raw world, made accessible by the intensity of her involvement and compassion.

Featured photograph is from Ward 81: Voices.

About the Film
Ward 81: Voices is a gripping documentary about Mark’s time documenting the Oregon State Hospital, a psychiatric facility she first encountered while doing set photography for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Directed by Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Martin Bell (Streetwise), Mark’s husband and longtime collaborator, the film uses audio recordings, archival materials, and Mark’s extraordinary photographs to offer a remarkable snapshot of her creative process in action and the humanistic approach and long-term commitment to her subjects that have made Mark’s images landmarks in the field of documentary photography.

Featured photograph is from Encounters.

Melissa Harris is editor-at-large of Aperture Foundation, where she worked for more than twenty-five years, including as editor-in-chief of Aperture magazine from 2002 to 2012; under her leadership, the magazine received many honors, including ASME’s National Magazine Award for General Excellence. Harris has also edited more than forty books for Aperture, and has curated exhibitions for them, the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Milano Triennale, Milan; Fondazione Prada, Milan; the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice; Villa Pignatelli, Naples; Visa pour l’Image, Perpignan; and C/O Berlin among other venues. She continues to curate exhibitions worldwide. Harris teaches at New York University in the Tisch School of the Arts, Department of Photography & Imaging / Emerging Media. She served on New York City’s Community Board 5 for several years, and is a trustee of the John Cage Trust. A Wild Life, her biography of the photographer Michael Nichols, was published by Aperture in Summer 2017. Her biography of Josef Koudelka, commissioned by Magnum Foundation, will be published by Aperture this fall.

Dr. Karen Folger Jacobs is a writer and licensed therapist in Berkeley. At UC Berkeley her thesis comparing how women and men make moral decisions won the Chancellor's Dissertation Award. Jacobs and her high school classmate, Mary Ellen Mark, spent over a month in Oregon's only locked ward for women...to document life there. In the decades since then memories of the women continued to echo through our minds. Seeing any homeless person transports Jacobs to the indelible women of Ward 81. Jacobs and Mark cared about these women. They documented their existence. They will not be forgotten.


Melissa Harris & Dr. Karen Folger Jacobs on Mary Ellen Mark
Saturday, October 14: 1–2 PM
International Center of Photography
79 Essex Street
New York, NY 10002
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