FALKLAND ROAD PROSTITUTES OF BOMBAY

Mary Ellen Mark
FALKLAND ROAD PROSTITUTES OF BOMBAY

Photographs: Mary Ellen Mark

Publisher: Steidl

122 pages

Year: 2005

ISBN: 3-86521-128-3

Comments: Hardcover under dust jacket, 28,5 x 32,5 cm, color photographs. Second edition. In very good condition other than traces of use. Text in English.

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 the 2005 Steidl edition; the book has long been recognized as one of her major bodies of work.