Mary Ellen Mark: Ward 81, Oregon State Hospital

American photographer Mary Ellen Mark was fascinated by those on the margins of society.

State of the ward

In 1975 American photographer Mary Ellen Mark was commissioned by The Pennsylvania Gazette to do a story about the making of the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, based on the novel by Ken Kesey.

The film was shot at Oregon State Hospital, a mental institution. It was while Mark was there that she became aware of Ward 81, the women’s security ward and the only locked ward in the state. Women who were considered a threat to themselves or to others were kept there; some had been there for decades.

The following year Mark went back to Ward 81 with writer Karen Folger Jacobs. They stayed there for 36 days. The idea of an extended stay was that they would establish relationships with the women and that by immersing themselves in the life of the institution they might get a feeling of what, in Mark’s words, “it was like to be set aside from society”.

What emerged from the project was the sense that here were many spirited individuals (just like the characters in the film), not just pale wraiths in a monolithic institution.

Mark took a lot of photographs of the women. What they thought about this, and about the photographs, remains largely unrecorded. Some lark about in front of the camera; some seem oblivious of it. Some — like the woman in this image — don’t seem to want to be seen, let alone be photographed.

Mark — who died last year — was fascinated with those on the margins of society. She was a good photographer and she was interested in the lives of those she photographed.

But the uncomfortable fact remains that we are looking at someone who is in pain. It’s pos­sible that such exposure may increase our compassion but it’s also likely, as critic Susan Sontag points out, that it will simply lower the threshold of what we feel it is bearable to see.

And while the photographer may survive her own descent into hell, as it were (returning to professional glory), those she photographs, despite the profundity or otherwise of their visions, probably will not.

In this untitled photograph (it’s not clear why the women are not given names), a patient uncomfortably straddles the head of a bed. We can’t see her face very well as she is looking to the ceiling and covering her mouth, perhaps suppressing a laugh or a cry.

What we can see well are the details of the room: the two beds, for instance, one bare, the other covered by a new-looking sheet that has not yet been tucked in; and the back wall, with its evidence of rising damp. The mattress and pillow are covered with institutional ticking. The stain on the wall seems to resolve into some kind of inscrutable script at the top.

These are the things that would fill our field of vision if we were incarcerated here; the things we unavoidably would be examining, reflecting the tedium and feeding any delusions. But we can move away from the nausea induced by these reduced circumstances, unlike the woman perched at the end of the bed.

Psychiatric practice changed (not least as a result of public opinion in the wake of Kesey’s novel and the film that was made of it), and Ward 81 closed not long after Mark’s time there.

Several of Mark’s photographs are on display in the Women in Power exhibition at the University of Sydney until April 8.

Mary Ellen Mark, Untitled (1976-78), JW Power Collection, managed by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, on display at University of Sydney Art Gallery.