2024-01-12 14:38:25
Dubai, United Arab Emirates (CNN) — Mary Ellen Mark could not forget Falkland Street.
The late American photographer was known for her ability to deal with any topic or issue she wanted to narrate smoothly, but communicating with prostitutes in the famous Red Zone, located on the fringes of Mumbai society, proved difficult at first.
She later wrote in the introduction to her book Falkland Street, Bombay Prostitutes (Bombay is the British name for the city that became Mumbai in 1995, published in 1981): “For 10 years I tried to take photographs on Falkland Street, and was met with hostility and hostility every time.” .
In her book, she recounted her first trips to the most populous city in India, in the late 1960s, and how “women threw garbage and water at me, and pirated me. “My face. So needless to say, I wasn’t able to take very good photos.”
The recently re-released book, which contains more than 70 of Mark’s photographs, has received international acclaim for highlighting the plight of sex workers, who are trafficked by pimps and pimps, beaten, and vulnerable to disease.
The late Mark told the New York Times Magazine in 1987 that the book “was intended to metaphorically express how difficult it is to be a woman.”
Meredith Law, president of the Mary Ellen Mark Foundation, told CNN that the late photographer, who lived a challenging family life in her youth, found herself drawn to and reaching out to vulnerable people.
“They often form small communities, often women or young people who are kind of overlooked, or don’t get a lot of attention,” Lu added. She noted that this was likely what attracted Mark to the sex workers on Falkland Street. She added, “Many of these women did not have a family, but they created a family, and they found women who took care of them and considered them sisters.”
As Mark herself wrote about one of the subjects of her photographs in her introduction to Falkland Street: “Saroja never asked me anything personal. None of them did. They just wanted to know my age, why I wasn’t wearing a bra, why I wasn’t married. I think… “The reason I finally accepted that I was single, and alone in the world like them. One of the women said to me: ‘We are sisters. You and I are destined to live the same life. Every night I pray and sleep alone.’
Nepalese prostitutes wait for their clients on Falkland Street in MumbaiCredit: Mary Ellen Mark
Friends in lowly places
In 1978, Mark returned to Falkland Street. The night before she began her six-week assignment for GEO (a German monthly magazine much like National Geographic), she had a dream in which a voyeur was hiding behind a bed, watching three sex workers having sex. She woke up “rather reassured,” she wrote in the introduction, adding, “Maybe my dream was a good sign.”
To begin with, the 1978 trip was much like the previous one: she was cursed at and had trash thrown at her as she walked up and down the street. But as the days passed, Mark’s constant presence aroused people’s interest, and I was invited to enter these worlds.
“It wasn’t a place where she was welcome, and I kind of stood my ground,” she explained. “She wasn’t aggressive, but she literally wanted to be there,” Low told CNN. “Her persistence gave (the people on Falkland Street) a sense of ‘OK, she’s interested in us and she’s not a threat, she’s not doing anything bad.'”
First, street prostitutes were quicker to befriend Mark. They often met at the Olympia Café, the girls’ favorite place. “I spent hours there, drinking tea and listening to qawwali (Islamic Sufi verses) and Hindi film songs on the jukebox,” wrote Mark, who died in 2015, aged 75. Her companions were Asha and Mumtaz, aged 17, and Usha, aged 15.
The women worked as prostitutes at night, and went about their routine as housewives during the day… like any other Indian woman. Credit: Mary Ellen Mark
Mark described Asha as one of the most beautiful girls she had ever seen. She was an orphan and her boyfriend, a local pickpocket, was constantly in and out of prison. She wrote: “One time, Asha disappeared for four days. I found out that she had been arrested for solicitation, so I hired a man to pay her bail.” Whenever Mark visited Falkland Street at dawn, she would see Asha curled up with one of the other girls, sleeping in the street. She continued: “I would wait until eight in the morning, then I would wake her up and we would have tea.”
Women who lured clients themselves, without a pimp or pimp paying a fine, were often arrested and imprisoned. They often suffered from hunger, illness, and heat, or they had pickpocketing friends who would beat them and take their money.
“They form close friendships and are very protective of each other,” Mark wrote.
Asha hated being a prostitute, but she knew no other profession.
Her best friend in the community was a transgender woman named Champa, who in turn introduced Mark to the brothel’s sex workers, many of whom were eunuchs, who allowed her to photograph them putting on make-up and getting ready for the evening.
Trans sex workers crossdressing in a courtyard. Credit: Mary Ellen Mark
The most challenging group were the ‘Cage Girls’, where the women of Falkland Street were paraded within small roadside rooms with barred windows, and suffered frequent abuse and taunts, often from the clients they were assigned to seduce. Mark recounted that they were considered to be of the lowest class even by other prostitutes. The photographer added that they were making hideous and obscene poses and gestures to seduce the clients, even though even the most aggressive among them were at great risk.
The same applies to pimps who fiercely guard their daughters. One of them, who ran a brothel on Falkland Street, told Mark she was kidnapped from her village in south India when she was 12 and taken to Mumbai. The former sex worker saved money and gradually borrowed enough to open her own brothel.
Mark became very attached to her subjects and found it painful to say goodbye when the shoot was over. “Saroja and I embraced, and she presented me with a huge wreath. We all cried,” she wrote, adding, “Women waved at me from their windows. I passed by the cages, and some women came out to shake my hand.” Mark remembers how Ciampa, the transgender woman, “ran across the street and said, ‘Send me a wig from America, sister, and every time I wear it I will think of you.’”
While she was having her last tea at Olympia Cafe, Usha, Asha and other friends gathered and the photographer started crying. “You shouldn’t cry. You should say goodbye with your head held high and proud and then leave,” Mark remembers Asha saying. She accompanied Mark to the street to take a taxi and said to her: “You better not forget me.”
Hidden in plain sight
Mark has always been interested in telling stories that could not be told otherwise, according to Lu, who works in parallel with the Mary Ellen Mark Foundation to republish and display some of the more than 60,000 images of the photographer’s work.
A retrospective of her work, including photographs from Falkland Street, Berlin, Germany, is currently on view until mid-January. “She was drawn to stories from the edge…to people she didn’t know,” Mark’s husband, Bill, told CNN, adding: She was able to bring those stories to a broader understanding in the community. I think this is a great thing you have achieved.”
For Lou, too, this is the magic of Mark’s photography, having the ability to bring the often outcast fringes of society closer to home. Her favorite photos from Falkland Street are not candid ones, but those in which she captures everyday moments and relationships.
Falkland Street remains a red zone today but the wider world has changed in many ways since Mark’s visit in the 1970s. At the end of the previous edition of her book, published in 2005, Mark wrote: “Today, no magazine sponsors a project like Falkland Street.” The real, everyday world, for the most part, we no longer see in magazines. The only documentary photography we see is confined to wars. “Disasters, conflicts, and almost any other issue has been replaced by fashion and celebrity photography.”
She concluded, “The candid and personal world of Falkland Street would be more difficult to access today because the planet is connected to the Internet and cable TV, and everyone is more aware of the power of the media. I often wonder how the women of Falkland Street would react to me if I approached them now. Would they be afraid?” “Who would categorize them or create interest around them? Will they ask me for money? They have never done that before.”
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