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Mary Ellen Mark, Salmon Sperm and Teen Pregnancy
2026
By Katilin Pignataro
More often than not, and particularly with the iron grip of social media upon our throats, most artworks we see anticipate their reception before it has even been received. The work (and the artist’s performance of themselves), much like a demanding child, tells the curator exactly who it wants to sit next to, exactly what feedback it wants to hear, and exactly what statement it is making.
Has the rather super-modern obsession with meeting increasingly convoluted expectations that purportedly funnels you through the pipe of Money/FameSlop/SocialClout caused photographers once inspired by Mark to circumvent any actual meaning of their work in favour of a codified aesthetic legibility?
In the year of 2026, it seems increasingly that artists seek sufficiency to navigate the competition they rub shoulders with. Something sufficient to please the eye, something sufficient to complicate a discussion, and something sufficiently uncontroversial to become fodder for the ‘yes men’ and the visually stupored among us.
Any meaning latent in the support becomes secondary to the appearance of meaning, and “profundity” becomes difficult to discern when so many images have been diluted in the wave of treating everything like a Promethean wonder. I digress.
To see what I mean, look at an image that does the opposite.
Looking at the black and white gelatin silver print of Jeanette and Victor, I'm almost offended by my own prudent reaction to the image. Two teenagers lie supine on a striped quilt, and although I can't discern what colours it's made up of, it is a signifier of the home in summertime, of sleeping in the living room when your bedroom got too hot and the drone of a pedestal fan.
Victor and Jeanette's faces are less than an inch apart, with the soft pads of their noses about to touch. Jeanette smiles bashfully, and Victor's eyes are slitted, nearly closed. She lies in wait, eyes open, for his to soon meet hers; maybe they’d then laugh. His hand leans against her knee with tender assertion. Victor wears two silver bangles around his wrist; he's shirtless and appears to be wearing some sort of breakaway pants, not unlike a sporty cowboy ready to wrangle Spahn Ranch, think Bonanza.
Victor is 14 and tethered only to a future of his own. For Jeanette, in her frilled, jersey smock and linen slacks, the same cannot be said. It is July 1978; Ed Koch is mayor; Le Freak by Chic is Billboard’s number one hit single, and 15-year-old Jeanette Alejandro is heavily pregnant with a baby girl named, with rueful irony, one may think, Chastity.
Jeanette's pregnancy was not particularly remarkable. As she later recalled, “there's Miriam, and Wanda, Ros - this is another Rosa - and Elizabeth - she's only 13—and Lori, the one on Clermont. I knew kids who were pregnant in the sixth and seventh grade, too”. Her younger sister, Rosa, was 14 and pregnant by her boyfriend, Lonnie, who was still a teenager himself when the interview appeared in The New York Times.
What made Jeanette’s pregnancy stand lonesome from the statistics was analogue photojournalist and instinctual storyteller, Mary Ellen Mark, and her 1978–9 series Children of Desire.
Mark met Jeanette with Victor and a flurry of balloons at New York City’s 1978 Puerto Rican Day Parade and documented her life for the next year: the birth of Chastity, her father’s futile existence in her life, Jeanette’s acceptance of Victor’s seemingly inevitable absence, and her desire to take her daughter disco skating as she gets older.
Much of Mark’s career was spent circulating the stories of those societies deemed complacent in their circumstances. Her 1980s series Streetwise became arguably her most well-known project, documenting teenagers living on the street and confronting the optimism and opulence of the decade with images of petty theft, prostitution and childhoods that got the boot far too early.
Refreshingly sharp-witted, when asked whether Mark continued photographing the teenagers of Streetwise out of responsibility, she rejected the notion.
“It’s not a sense of responsibility,” she said. “I wish I could say that, and then I’d be, like, saintly, or something like that. It’s because it’s interesting, it’s fascinating.”
What makes Mark’s images so arresting is that they don’t bother to prescribe what you should think or feel through ‘virtue-signalling’ optics; in fact, it’s the lack of that which keeps me scouring the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine for any Mary Ellen Mark morsels I can find whenever I get the chance.
It's been nearly 50 years since Mark first photographed Jeanette, and the radical stretch of time between then and now is intimidating. Jeanette has moved on, Chastity has moved on, Mark has passed on, and so has the way we produce and circulate imagery.
As the saying goes, there’s nothing new except what has been forgotten.
It would be wrong for me not to reference Yoona’s essay, “Mutation is the Aesthetic”: on Brianna Perry, toward a theory of Gen-Z fashions, in Hollywood Superstar, the art discourse/criticism publication du jour, though relievingly un-derivative.
Despite the article being about fashion, it holds the same sentiment, and reading it only made me feel further validated in my assertion that symbols are currently being hollowed out into a whole lot of nothingness. Yoona describes the gun as “one symbol from a whole arsenal of strong symbols seemingly emptied of any original meaning….” It is a parallel that feels difficult to ignore when so much of our visual sponge is soaking up pastiches of work similar to Mary Ellen Mark and others who were operating in her stratosphere, albeit at different times, such as Nan Goldin, Donna Bailey, Richard Kern and so on, a sort of epigonism in which the image survives but the circumstances that made it do not, like learning by being able to memorise and reproduce instead of actually knowing.
This is not to say that I don't desire seeing a couple mid-sex, or someone railing a line, or a bone sticking out of some grifter’s skin (can we use that word?), but it starts to become contrived when the image relies on the crutches of hyper-contemporary social knowledge of its predecessors.
So who really is here to blame? Is it the fault of the artist, whom we point the ‘unoriginal’ finger at? Is it the fault of the art schools that teach these referencing practices, and the cultural capital that comes with knowing how to reference them, or is it, at risk of sounding like a total conservative, the fault of everything being made so accessible, and the lowered expectations that surround us?
Perhaps this is to be expected in a culture where salmon cum can be injected into your arse for like $200 AUD, and you can pay an online witch off Etsy to curse your loser ex. The next thing you can buy is someone to take a photo of you doing a shot of heroin with flash on and post it to their IG - spoon and packet provided. Even better, you’re bruised or bloodied or dick’d in mouth’d, men and women alike.