2 WEEKLYPRESS.COM · UCREVIEW.COM · JULY 11· 2012


Photographer Mary Ellen Mark’s “Prom”


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magnification. They could adjust the lens and load and process the chemistry and the paper. With this camera, there is no negative – only a final print. It took twenty minutes or more for a por- trait, and Mark took three photographs of each subject. In the book Prom, from Getty Publications and the J. Paul Getty Museum, there are 127 large-format por- traits plus a 33-minute DVD by Mark’s husband, film- maker Martin Bell ($49.95). If the exhibition fascinates, the book is a must-have, not only because of the power of the size of the photos, but because it includes Martin Bell’s essential DVD, and a photo of Mary Ellen Mark at her prom at Cheltenham High School in 1958. In this young century,


there’s a huge preoccupa- tion with the persona one can create for, say, Facebook, and public posturing among the young is the norm, while truths too often lie hidden, elsewhere. So these prom portraits tell a “truth” that is partly the way Mary


Ellen Mark has structured it, and partly what these young but aware promgoers want to project as they pose for her and achieve immor- tality from her lens. But get them as Martin Bell does, in interviews shown at the back of the Perelman gallery in a small corner on a screen about the size of the portraits them- selves, and a whole other set of “truths” emerges. There is an intriguing dissonance here.


For example, where


PMA’s Brodsky Curator of Photographs, Peter Barberie, saw a mixed race couple very much in love in Mark’s portrait, the female seemed to me very solitary in her bearing and very separated from the male in their por- trait. In the video interview, she tells how anything she did or said or would do or say was all about “me and nobody else.” Her partner moved away from her as she elaborated on this egocentricity. The fact that he was black and she was white seemed a non-issue. It was her separateness from


other, her essential marriage to herself that stood out. What I had intuited in the portrait that she illuminated in the video was that she was her own prom date. There are lots of depar-


tures from the old prom date theme of the happy couple. In the Getty publica- tion of “Prom,” check out the photograph of Mary El- len Mark at her own prom. She is smiling and indeed, looks happy. And she is beautiful. I remember her from our Penn days, and she was as pretty as her picture. She says she still exchanges Christmas cards with her date, Stuart Eisenberg, and notes that “we were facing our perfect futures -- or so we thought.” In her 21st


cen-


tury chronicle, Mark talks about the candid boldness of the students: “Some were really eccentric. Some were worldly and confident.” But there is not a single portrait from her collection at the Perelman that looks like her 1958 prom picture, and virtually the only one smiling is the guy who has brought along two dates. They are not smiling. Here are the people who come alone and want to be pho- tographed solo. There is the super-smart Prom Queen from Austin, Texas who has


her single life all mapped out. There are the pregnant girls who don’t look as if they plan to stay with the guy, if he was the “guy” in the first place. Then, there are the nearly bare-naked ladies, and there are the gay couples. There are the gay couples who are comfort- able with their choices, like the black guy dressed in black and the white guy dressed in white, having fun, and there are gay cou- ples who look somber, or uncertain. In so many of the photographs, females dwarf their male partners physi- cally. In the video, they say things like, “I don’t really believe in marriage” and “I’ve never seen a marriage that worked out” or “This isn’t about love. It’s just about competition. Three hours ago, we weren’t even friends, and now we’re talk- ing about how great it was for four years together.” The video, where prom- goers were asked questions from a list of twenty, deliv- ers surprises too – some amusing, some shocking, some a surprise to the prom date. “I’m in love with you,” says the female. “Since when?” answers her date, moving away a bit. “It’s news to me!” An adorable senior in a polka dot dress says “I’m in love,” and her date replies, adoringly, “So am I.” Then there’s the young woman who says, knowingly, “You know what everyone does after the prom, and I don’t believe in doing that, so I’m here with my cousin.” Another one who doesn’t believe in “do- ing that” is a Prom Queen


Michael Glorioso and Eliza Wierzbinska, Staten Island, New York, 2006. Mary Ellen Mark (American b. 1940). Polaroid. 20 x 24 inches (61 x 50.8 cm). Image courtesy of the artist and © Mary Ellen Mark.


from Texas. She has come by herself, as her portrait avers. But when she tells her story, it is the one that would have been applauded 35 years ago – of a woman with clear ambition, who has won all the academic awards in her high school and has her eye on future prizes, has been admitted to an Ivy League university, plans on a research career in the bio-medical field, and says, definitively, “I don’t know about love.”


In the end, there is Mary Ellen Mark’s powerful set of 20x24 Polaroid images of – could one say, dare one say? – America’s future. And then there is the video,


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sometimes contradicting and sometimes confirming but always embroidering the “truths” of the photo- graphs. The video keeps coming back to a few of the promgoers. One Thomas Burrows, from Mark’s alma mater, Cheltenham High School, Class of 2006, his hair rising in 4-inch spikes from his scalp, says, “I don’t ever want to grow up. I want to ride my bike and play hackysack and watch cartoons…I just want to have fun for the rest of my life.” His prom date’s answer to that is “I want lots and lots and lots of money; it does matter.” And there’s the one who looks at his girlfriend and realizes that after the prom, things will never be the same. “We’ve been together for four years, but now we’re growing up, and I’ll have to pay bills.” There’s the sophisticated guy al- ready poised for life as a hedge fund manager who writes his future, starting with a yacht. The camera turns to his gorgeous blond prom date who says, “I agree with the yacht.” And ultimately there’s the one with Ewing’s sarcoma, strikingly bald and very beautiful. Ashley Conrad went out with her mom the day before the prom to get a dress. She says she once had long, curly, reddish- brown hair. She pauses, remembering. “I liked my hair,” she says. Then she says she feels more adult than her friends. “I don’t worry about the small things.” She pauses, “I know there are much big- ger things to face.”


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