Mary Ellen Mark: Passport

Mark's first photobook, redesigned and expanded to double its original page count, reveals the origin of her empathetic eye across her world travels

This is a new and redesigned edition of Mary Ellen Mark's debut book Passport, first published in 1974 by Lustrum Press. It features a collection of Mark's early work, shot on her overseas travels between 1963 and 1973. These photographs quickly drew attention for their persuasive humanism and Mark's ability to avoid clich?when depicting cultures exotic to her own, a challenge she navigated by aiming, in her words, to capture "something that evokes a certain kind of memory or response that's universal"--be the subject immigrants on their way to a new life in Istanbul, bathers in the Ganges or a man and his monkey begging in Kathmandu. For this Steidl edition, the original 56-page travel diary has been extended to 120 pages and features an additional text by Ralph Gibson, founder of Lustrum Press--a worthy update for this classic publication.
Mary Ellen Mark (1940-2015) received her master's degree in photojournalism from the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. In the late 1960s she relocated to New York City, documenting counterculture movements and societal outsiders. Over the course of her lifetime she published 18 photobooks and frequently contributed to Life, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair and other publications.