Mary Ellen Mark: Indian Circus

Playful yet haunting, Mark’s photographs of Indian circus performers capture a community on the verge of obsolescence

In 1969, American photographer Mary Ellen Mark traveled to India for the first time, where she photographed a circus and was “immediately struck by the beauty and innocence of the show.” Two decades later, she returned to India for a six-month period to embark on a project of documenting 18 circuses across the country.
From cities to villages, from large circuses with hundreds of performers (both human and animal) to those with only a few, Mark’s compassionate focus is the humanism of her subjects, shaped by ironies, the humorous and sad, the beautiful and ugly. Her images are tellingly not of performances themselves but of the lives lived between the show: scenes in tents and dusty aisles, of practice, rest and inevitably more practice. Circuses in India were already a dying art at the time of Mark’s photographs, reminiscent of the purity of days gone by, an innocence long lost in Western cultures and an attempt to head off the demands of the contemporary world. This new edition of the original 1993 book features the text and images from the original with a new design and sequence, preserving Mark’s compelling vision.
Mary Ellen Mark (1940–2015) received her master’s degree in photojournalism from the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. In the late 1960s she relocated to New York City, documenting counterculture movements and societal outsiders. Over the course of her lifetime she published 18 photobooks and frequently contributed to Life, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair and other publications.