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 <em>Encounters</em>, her first comprehensive retrospective on view at C/O Berlin through early 2024. This isn’t because I have some vendetta against her, but because the retrospective is so starkly removed from the contemporary zeitgeist that it isn’t just subject to bad faith readings. It practically invites them.</p>
<p>This isn’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>
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