Twins

Mary Ellen Mark has made some of America's most iconic images in a career spanning more than three decades. In Twins, Mark turns her acute eye and her heart to the extraordinary bond that exists between these very special siblings. For two consecutive years, she set up a studio on the site of America's premier twins festival "Twins Days" in Twinsburg, Ohio, and invited participants to be photographed. Using a Polaroid 20 x 24 camera, mark created an extraordinary body of work - a collection of sometimes beautiful, often unsettling images - that reveals subtle nuances in the relationships of the twins she observed.
These stunning portraits are accompanied by texts culled from an extensive series of interviews that Mark conducted with each set of twins after she photographed them. These salient sound bites of conversation illuminate the often complex and significant subtleties of everyday life as a twin, where sibling bonds and rivalries are infused with a unique profundity, where going to school, going on a date, or simply having a spouse, can often take on comical proportions and where the loss of one's twin is tantamount to losing part of oneself.
With eighty images gorgeously printed in tritone, Twins replicates the stellar quality of Mark's large-format photographs in a fitting tribute to one of America's photographers.

Mary Ellen Mark has achieved worldwide visibility through her books, exhibitions, and editorial magazine work. Among her many publications are Streetwise (1988), Indian Circus (1993), and Mary Ellen Mark: American Odyssey (1999).