February 2025: Ward 81
Photographs by Mary Ellen Mark, text by Karen Folger Jacobs, with an introduction by Miloš Forman. Designed by Arne Lewis. Fireside Books, a division of Simon and Schuster, New York, 1979. 96 pages.
A landmark publication by documentary photographer Mary Ellen Mark, Ward 81 (1979) records portraits of female patients in a psychiatric facility in the mid-1970s. In 1976, Mark embarked on this arduous, self-assigned project with sociologist Dr. Karen Folger Jacobs, intending to document the lives of women living in the high-security, all-female wing of the Oregon State Hospital in the city of Salem.
The year before, Mark had photographed there on the set of the Miloš Forman’s film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and she had met several women who lived on Ward 81 of the hospital. Hoping to better understand and represent their life experiences, Mark and Jacobs arranged to spend five weeks living ialongside the women in Ward 81. The duration of their stay, and their extraordinary access to patients and staff, enabled the collaborators to produce a nuanced and compelling record of female psychiatric treatment in the United States during the mid-1970s. Their book, Ward 81, published in 1979, revealed the often-porous line between sanity and mental illness for women relegated to the margins of society. The exhibition Mary Ellen Mark: Ward 81 currently on view at CPW examines in depth the sources for the original publication. It includes many never-before- seen prints, contact sheets, and archival materials, including the original maquette for the first edition. It is accompanied by the publication Mary Ellen Mark and Karen Folger Jacobs, Ward 81: Voices, edited by Martin Bell, Julia Bezgin, and Meredith Lue (Steidl, 2023), which adds additional photographs, texts, and transcripts of interviews with the female patients.
