Overview

'The Indian circus is a metaphor for everything that has always fascinated me visually.' - Mary Ellen Mark This is a new edition of Mary Ellen Mark’s 1993 book Indian Circus, depicting the great daring and constant hard work of the circus performers, and, most importantly, the feeling of family the circus created. Mark had already photographed a circus in India on her first trip there in 1968—“I was immediately struck by the beauty and innocence of the show”—yet it was not until 1989–90 that she dedicated herself to documenting 18 circuses during two three-month trips. From cities to villages, from large circuses with hundreds of performers (both human and animal) to those with only a few, Mark’s compassionate focus is the humanism of her subjects, shaped by ironies, the humorous and sad, the beautiful and ugly. Her images are tellingly not of performances but of the lives lived between the show: scenes in tents and the dusty aisles between them, of practice, rest, and inevitably more practice. Circuses in India were already a dying art at the time of Mark’s photographs: reminiscent of the purity of days gone by and an innocence long lost in Western cultures, they were an attempt to head off the demands of the contemporary world. This Steidl edition, featuring the texts and images from the original with a revised design and sequence, gives new life to Mark’s compelling vision.

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9783969993149

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The images of Mary Ellen Mark (1940–2015) are icons of documentary and humanistic photography. Mark’s more than 20 books include Passport (1974), Falkland Road (1981) and Indian Circus (1993). Her 2015 book Tiny: Streetwise Revisited is a culmination of 32 years documenting Erin Blackwell (Tiny), who featured in Martin Bell’s 1984 film Streetwise and Mark’s 1988 book of the same name. A dedicated social documentarian and portraitist, she often turned her lens to marginalized communities—circus performers in India, street children in Seattle, psychiatric patients, and many others—invariably connecting profoundly with her subjects. Mark’s work has been exhibited and published in magazines worldwide. Steidl has published The Book of Everything (2020), Ward 81: Voices (2023), Falkland Road (2023) and Encounters (2023).

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