Word: ward
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Hence, in part, the extraordinary interest of a show by New York Photographer Mary Ellen Mark, now on view at the Castelli Uptown gallery in Manhattan. Under the title "Ward 81," it records what Mark saw and experienced in the spring of 1976 during a six-week sojourn in the women's section of the maximum security ward of the Oregon State Hospital. "I wanted," says Mark, "to do an essay on the personalities of people who are locked away-to show a little bit of what they're like, especially the women. I didn't want...
Mark got permission from the patients and staff to live in an unused part of Ward 81. "If you're someone who photographs people, you're always an intruder," she says. "It took a while to get a rapport-the stronger photos didn't come till we got to know the women, and they got involved in the project. They felt they were making some kind of contact with the outside world...
...images of neurosis to be compared with the late Diane Arbus. Actually, with Mark, the comparison is not very useful. The harsh solipsism of Arbus' shots, their frontal, specimen-like character, the sense that one is conspiratorially sharing a taste for alienation - none of that emerges from "Ward 81." Mark does not skimp on desperation. There are grotesqueries, like the image of a male patient beginning a hand stand - a knot of barely decipherable limbs, a weird sculpture on the glittering linoleum. But the general character of the photographs is to convey sympathy with these trapped lives. Nowhere...
West Virginians have always had five friends?God Almighty, Sears Roebuck, Montgomery Ward, Carter's Little Liver Pills and Robert C. Byrd...
...From this picture, they hope to obtain a more definitive view of the strange events around Palmdale. That knowledge, in turn, could eventually enable them to predict if-and possibly when and where -an earthquake will strike. "'Uplifts have been observed before several major earthquakes," notes Seismologist Peter Ward, chief of earthquake mechanics and predictions for the U.S.G.S. Among these quakes is California's last large temblor, the one that shook the San Fernando Valley in 1971, taking 58 lives...