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I don't know if you've spent much time in your life pondering the eternal question of what happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object. The closest I've ever come to an answer is Mary Ellen Mark, although in her case the question should be slightly revised to "What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable subject?" The answer is that the subject generally moves, and becomes a willing accomplice in the production of powerful photography. In a career that spans four decades, and is nowhere near over yet, she has brought us image after image that not only embed themselves into our memory but in doing so help us define ourselves as the cohabitants of a small planet. As a picture editor who has had the privilege of assigning her stories that have produced some of her classic works I have witnessed the focused intensity that she brings to her professional life, and which tolerates no compromise.
It seems that this level of determination and commitment is something that is not acquired but imprinted into a photographer's DNA from birth. Proof of this can be found in the new reprint of her book Falkland Road: Prostitutes of Bombay that Steidl will publish in March this year. The photographs in this book were shot between October 1978 and January 1979 on an impoverished street in Bombay that houses numerous brothels where cheap prostitutes work and live. It was a street that fascinated her on her first visit to India in the late Sixties, and one to which she vowed to return. A decade was to pass before she would go back in late 1978 with an assignment from Geo in her pocket.
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