The exhibition at Center for Photography at Woodstock, New York, highlights Mary Ellen Mark’s groundbreaking 1976 series documenting women in a secure psychiatric ward. It includes never-before-seen prints, contact sheets, archival materials, and Moonlight Heaven Black, a short film created by Mark’s husband, Martin Bell.
In 1976, photographer Mary Ellen Mark embarked on a challenging self-initiated project in collaboration with sociologist Dr. Karen Folger Jacobs. Together, they documented the lives of women confined to Ward 81, a high-security psychiatric unit for women at the Oregon State Hospital in Salem. A year earlier, Mark had visited the hospital while photographing on the set of Milǒs Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. During her time there, she met several residents of Ward 81 and felt compelled to explore their lives more deeply. To gain a more authentic understanding of these women’s experiences, Mark and Jacobs arranged to live in Ward 81 for an entire month. This unprecedented access to both patients and staff allowed them to produce an intimate and empathetic portrayal of life in the ward, shedding light on female psychiatric treatment in 1970s America. The result of their work was the groundbreaking book Ward 81, published in 1978, which captured the fragile boundary between societal notions of sanity and mental illness. As Jacobs observed, “These women are who we might have been—or who we could one day become.”
The exhibition Mary Ellen Mark: Ward 81 builds upon that seminal study. Among its highlights are newly discovered audio recordings made by the women of Ward 81 in conversations with Jacobs, now featured in a short film titled Moonlight Heaven Black, created for the exhibition by Mark’s husband, filmmaker Martin Bell. In addition, the exhibition showcases previously unseen prints, contact sheets, and rare archival materials, offering fresh insights into this important project.
Originally curated by Gaëlle Morel and Kaitlin Booher for the Image Centre in Toronto, the exhibition was organized in collaboration with the Mary Ellen Mark Foundation in New York. It is accompanied by the publication Ward 81: Voices by Mary Ellen Mark and Karen Folger Jacobs, edited by Martin Bell, Julia Bezgin, and Meredith Lue (Steidl, 2023).