Mary Ellen MarkFALKLAND ROAD LES PROSTITUEES DE BOMBAY
Photographs: Mary Ellen Mark
Publisher: Filipacchi
122 pages
Year: 1981
ISBN: 2-85018-424-1
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On her very first trip to India in 1968 Mary Ellen Mark visited Falkland Road, the notorious red-light area in Mumbai. She tried to photograph there yet was consistently met with hostility and aggression, both from the prostitutes she sought to portray and the men who were their customers. Resilient, she returned in 1978 for a magazine assignment and over the course of six weeks she slowly began to make friends and finally entered the daily lives of these women: “I had no idea if I could do this,” she later recalled, “but I knew I had to try.” Mark’s portrait of Falkland Road is beautiful and shocking, remarkable for its intimate emotional power and visceral color. Falkland Road was initially published in 1981 and with additional photos in a 2005 Steidl edition; the book has long been recognized as one of her major bodies of work.
