The Wittliff Collections Texas State University Alkek Library, 7th Floor TX San Marcos États-Unis
The Wittliff Collections at Texas State University will open a major exhibition of images by renowned documentary photographer Mary Ellen Mark, Man and Beast: Photographs from Mexico and India. On view through December 7, 2014, Man and Beast celebrates the University of Texas Press publication of the new Wittliff Collections series book by the same name.
The public is invited to the exhibition reception, artist talk, and book launch/signing with Mary Ellen Mark at 2:00 p.m. on Sunday, April 27, 2014. Attendees are asked to RSVP to thewittliffcollections@txstate.edu.
Admission to both the exhibition and event is free.
The Wittliff Collections are located on the seventh floor of Texas State’s Alkek Library in San Marcos, between Austin and San Antonio. Exhibition hours, directions, parking information, and other details about visiting the Wittliff are online. For questions, call 512.245.2313.
THE EXHIBITION
Mary Ellen Mark, recognized as one of America’s most respected and influential photographers, has been taking uniquely sensitive and expressive images of people around the world for nearly 50 years. The title for this exhibition and the new Wittliff Collections’ publication, Man and Beast, was inspired by a dominant theme of Mark’s oeuvre: the relationships between people and animals, including, as Mark writes, “the anthropomorphic quality of animals and the animalistic quality of man.”
The Man and Beast exhibition gathers together more than 90 of the Wittliff’s images taken by Mark in Mexico and India, countries that have repeatedly drawn her attention since the late 1960s. Many of the people represented here are performers and trainers with various itinerant circuses. Mark began to visit these circuses during her initial trip to India in 1968, and she was able to focus on the subject in depth when she photographed 18 Indian traveling circuses in 1989 and 1990, and others in Mexico in 1997.
Mark describes the circus as “a universal form of theater.” “It incorporates,” she writes, “so many things—beauty, irony, poetry, tragedy.” The circus also provides a launching point to explore other themes that pervade Mark’s work and are particularly prevalent in this exhibition: the mutability of identity through costume and performance; hope, humor, and faith in difficult circumstances; and the innate human (and animal) need for contact and community—in the fullest range of its meaning.
The Mary Ellen Mark exhibition Man and Beast: Photographs from Mexico and India was organized by the director of the Wittliff Collections, David Coleman. It is on view from January 21 through December 7, 2014.