Mary Ellen Mark began working for Look and Life magazines in the 1960s. She has since created photo essays for a broad range of news and fashion periodicals including Esquire, Holiday, the New York Times Magazine, Vogue, Stern, and Paris-Match. Having conceived the idea for many of the articles herself, Mark often returns to subjects (and places) for an extended period, producing book-length documentary projects. Her most well-recognized subjects include Mother Teresa and the Mission of Charity in India: the inmates of Ward 81, a locked ward for women at Oregon State Mental Hospital; prostitutes on Falkland Road in Bombay; and members of an Indian circus.

Mark photographs people, often people who are living on the edge of society. The works included in Mary Ellen Mark: In American, in the Bell Gallery collection, concentrate primarily on subsections of the middle and lower-middle classes: Christian bikers in Arizona, retirees in South Beach Florida, the Latin community in Miami. Taken throughout the southwest between 1986 and 1991, the works are reminiscent in framing and focus to those of Diana Arbus. However, the attitudes of the photographers differ: Arbus documented the aberrant with cool observation, Mark engages with the subject to illuminated larger social issues.

Mark's portrait of Roy Cohn was taken in July 1986. The infamous conservative was best known for his prosecution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and the Army-McCarthy trail of the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings. A closeted gay Jew, Cohn actively prosecuted gays throughout his career. He died, one month after this portrait was taken, of opportunistic infections associated with AIDS.

Mary Ellen Mark: In American was published by Double Elephant Editions Ltd. in 1992. The portfolio is a gift of Richard H. Hiller ('66) and Marsha Hurst ('67).