Despite the many months since meeting Mary Ellen Mark, the experience and insights are still vivid. And I’m realizing I didn’t get too much down in the last post.

The question I asked MEM at the Texas Monthly Talks Q&A was how she got around in India during her many months in India for her Falkland Road: Prostitutes of Bombay assignment, how she met her contacts, and if she used a fixer to gain access to her subjects. She first reminisced on the luxury of being on a magazine assignment for three months and how a long and open assignment like that is non-existent today.

Mark hates using fixers and didn’t employ any for that assignment. (Although she did admit the project would not have been possible or the same if she tried to it today, as people are much more camera aware and wary than they were in the 1970s) She believes hiring a fixer changes the dynamics of her relationship to her subjects and makes them less genuine.

Mark spent days across the street of the brothel she was hoping to document before making a few friends with the prostitutes who eventually brought her in and gave full access to their lives. (This was after 10 years of trying to take pictures there, being met with aggression and anger) She befriended and listened to the stories of the madams, the transvestites, and cage girls of Falkland Road. Her images portray the honest and explicit lives of her subjects in a thoughtful and intimate way. The magazine that sent Mark out to India, GEO, decided not to use the images in their American publication as they thought they were too explicit. They did however publish 13 pages of images in their sister publication in Germany, Stern Magazine.