Mary Ellen Mark, Ward 81 — Fanny Bieth

[Fall 2023]

Mary Iris eyes, Ward 81, Oregon State Hospital, Oregon, USA, 1976, épreuve à la gélatine argentique / gelatin silver prints, permission de / courtesy of the Mary Ellen Mark Foundation / Howard Greenberg Gallery

By Fanny Bieth

[Excerpt]

The Image Centre, Toronto
25.01.2023 — 1.04.2023

In winter 1975, Mary Ellen Mark was the on-set photographer for the shooting of Miloš Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest on location at a psychiatric institution, the Oregon State Hospital, where she first met and photographed patients. She returned the following year, accompanied by the author Karen Folger Jacobs, to spend thirty-six days immersed in the daily life of the residents of pavilion 81, a highly secure closed women’s ward. The exhibition Ward 81, presented at the Image Centre in Toronto, curated by Gaëlle Morel and Kaitlin Booher, brings together about a hundred of the black-and-white photographs that Mark took during this stay, as well as numerous archival documents.

The first gallery offers a context. On the wall facing the entrance are a large floor plan of pavilion 81 and an introductory text. Portraits taken by Mark – a mixture of actors and patients – hang on the right-and left-hand walls. A few contact sheets from Mark’s shoots, as well as Forman’s, and a large reproduction of a New York Times article on the movie complete the presentation. The grouping gives an overview of the particular atmosphere of photographing inside an active psychiatric facility and an idea of Mark’s position in and path through the community that formed there…

[ Complete issue, in print and digital version, available here: Ciel variable 124 – SEEING THROUGH IMAGES ]
[ Complete article, in digital version, available here: Mary Ellen Mark, Ward 81 — Fanny Bieth ]