Girls On Film: Mary Ellen Mark at C/O Berlin

<p>Some part of me is glad Mary Ellen Mark did not live to see&nbsp;<em>Encounters</em>, her first comprehensive retrospective on view at C/O Berlin through early 2024. This isn&rsquo;t because I have some vendetta against her, but because the retrospective is so starkly removed from the contemporary zeitgeist that it isn&rsquo;t just subject to bad faith readings. It practically invites them.</p> <p>This isn&rsquo;t hypothetical. Standing in the gift shop flipping through monographs I had no intention of buying, I overheard a woman approximately my age offer her opinion of the show to her companion in the form of a question: what exactly gave this white, cis, heterosexual, able-bodied, middle class woman the right to take these pictures? The right to depict these communities of which she was most certainly not a part? (Ren Hang, whose spectacular monograph she picked up seconds later, was not subject to the same critique. To do a little bad faith reading of my own, I can only assume this has to do with his being a young Chinese man who primarily photographed other young Chinese people. How depressing.)</p> <p><a href="https://medium.com/@ellecarroll01/girls-on-film-7c3e1a3ff174"><strong>Read More</strong></a></p>
Tags: Ellen Mark