A Photographic Life - 31: Plus Mary Ellen Mark

In episode 31 UNP founder and curator Grant Scott is in his shed considering the recent discussions around stock photography and 'free' photography in respect to the recent Squarespace and Unsplash collaboration. He also follows on from last week's podcast with an update on using charcoal to teach photography! Plus this week Grant re-visits a recorded conversation with legendary photographer Mary Ellen Mark from 2012 on the publication of her book Prom. In this short edited clip Ellen Mark comments on the importance of simplicity in portrait of photography and for the image to be about the subject and not the photographer. If you would like to learn more about Unsplash and their business model I suggest watching this excellent filmed interview with Mikael Cho, the company's Co-Founder and CEO. www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZevNRITnWU Mary Ellen Mark was an American photographer known for her photojournalism, documentary photography, portraiture, and advertising photography. She photographed people who were "away from mainstream society and toward its more interesting, often troubled fringes". Mark had 18 collections of her work published, most notably Streetwise and Ward 81. Her work was exhibited at galleries and museums worldwide and published in Life, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, New York Times, and Vanity Fair magazine. She was a member of Magnum Photos between 1977 and 1981 and received numerous accolades, including three Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards, three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the 2014 Lifetime Achievement in Photography Award from the George Eastman House and the Outstanding Contribution Photography Award from the World Photography Organisation. She died in 2015. You can also access and subscribe to these podcasts at SoundCloud https://soundcloud.com/unofphoto on iTunes https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/a-photographic-life/id1380344701 on Player FM https://player.fm/series/a-photographic-life and Podbean www.podbean.com/podcast-detail/i6uqx-6d9ad/A-Photographic-Life-Podcast Grant Scott is the founder/curator of United Nations of Photography, a Senior Lecturer in Professional Photography at the University of Gloucestershire, a working photographer, and the author of Professional Photography: The New Global Landscape Explained (Focal Press 2014) and The Essential Student Guide to Professional Photography (Focal Press 2015). His next book #New Ways of Seeing: The Democratic Language of Photography will be published by Bloomsbury Academic in January 2019. His documentary film, Do Not Bend: The Photographic Life of Bill Jay will be screened across the UK and the US in 2018. © Grant Scott 2018