Indian Circus by Mary Ellen Mark

First Edition/Impression

Hardcover. In fine Condition with some very minor toning to dust jacket – now in a removable sleeve.

About

I was immediately struck by the beauty and innocence of the showyet it was not until 198990 that she dedicated herself to documenting 18 circuses during two three-month trips. From cities to villages, from large circuses with hundreds of performers (both human and animal) to those with only a few, Marks 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 but of the lives lived between the show: scenes in tents and the dusty aisles between them, of practice, rest, and inevitably more practice. Circuses in India were already a dying art at the time of Marks photographs: reminiscent of the purity of days gone by and an innocence long lost in Western cultures, they were an attempt to head off the demands of the contemporary world. This Steidl edition, featuring the texts and images from the original with a revised design and sequence, gives new life to Marks compelling vision.