My life changed in the fall of 1963 when I started at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and discovered photography. The school was relatively new then (about five years old) and was more about art and craft.
I remember the first day I went out on the streets with a camera at the Annenberg School. I walked the streets of downtown Philadelphia, in a rather boring middle-class neighborhood. There were women with children, and dogs, and people sitting on stoops-just ordinary people. It was a fall day, and the weather was beautiful.
I think it was the connection with people that astounded me. I saw that my camera gave me a connection with others that I had never had before. It allowed me to enter lives, satisfying a curiosity that was always there, but that was never explored before. On that day, I realized that the world was open to me. I realized all of the possibilities that could exist for me with my camera; all of the images that I could capture, all the lives I could enter, all the people I could meet and how much I could learn from them. On that day, my life changed forever. I realized there was no turning back; I was meant to be a photographer.
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Text:© Mary Ellen Mark
Voice: Charlotte Brown (AI)
