From the New Yorker issue of 10/13/25 (which has not yet arrived at my house), on-line on 10/5, “Takes: Rebecca Mead on Mary Ellen Mark’s photo from the Puerto Rican Day Parade” — from the New Yorker Classics, about “Forward, March” by MEM, in the 6/23/2003 print edition. This photo:
[caption:] Candice Lozada, nine, and Fantashia Toro, eleven, of the S.B.K. (South Bronx Kids) Dance Group, waiting for the Puerto Rican Day Parade to start
Background. From the Wikipedia entry on MEM (3/20/40 – 5/25/15):
In 1966 or 1967, she moved to New York City, where over the next several years she photographed demonstrations in opposition to the Vietnam War, the women’s liberation movement, transvestite culture, and Times Square, developing a sensibility, according to one writer, “away from mainstream society and toward its more interesting, often troubled fringes”.
Her photography addressed social issues such as homelessness, loneliness, drug addiction, and prostitution. Children are a recurring subject throughout much of Mark’s work. She described her approach to her subjects: “I’ve always felt that children and teenagers are not “children,” they’re small people. I look at them as little people and I either like them or I don’t like them. I also have an obsession with mental illness. And strange people who are outside the borders of society.” Mark also said “I’d rather pull up things from another culture that are universal, that we can all relate to… There are prostitutes all over the world. I try to show their way of life.” and that “I feel an affinity for people who haven’t had the best breaks in society. What I want to do more than anything is acknowledge their existence”.
Mark was well known for establishing strong relationships with her subjects. For Ward 81 (1979), she lived for six weeks with the patients in the women’s security ward of Oregon State Hospital [a mental hospital], and for Falkland Road (1981), she spent three months befriending the prostitutes who worked on a single long street in Bombay. Her project “Streets of the Lost” with writer Cheryl McCall, for Life, produced her book Streetwise (1988) and was developed into the documentary film Streetwise, directed by her husband Martin Bell and with a soundtrack by Tom Waits.
Rebecca Mead on “Forward, March”.
When the photographer Mary Ellen Mark arrived in New York City, in 1966, one of her strategies for finding arresting images was to attend parades and other large gatherings, seeking out subjects not in the main flow of the action but on the periphery. Mark shot street protests, Pride marches, and Thanksgiving parades — showing how the city’s diverse cultures and identities are replenished by the demonstrative joy of belonging, and how the city at large is enriched by its variety of communities. After Mark’s death, in 2015, the journalist Adrian Nicole LeBlanc wrote of her, “Common humanity wasn’t a revelation but a clear fact that she wanted to document.” Mark’s warm engagement with the individuals she encountered reflected a genuine openness that invited a reciprocal trust, LeBlanc noted: “Her assumption allowed her subjects’ singularity to grow in her presence.”
In this photograph, which Mark made before the start of the Puerto Rican Day Parade in 2003, her subjects — Candice Lozada, nine; Fantashia Toro, eleven — seem literally to have grown in Mark’s presence. The girls, both members of the South Bronx Kids Dance Group, are shot from a low vantage, their images doubled by the reflective glass of a storefront, and they look down into Mark’s lens with a cool, confident regard. Pedestrians are hurrying past to find their places on Fifth Avenue, but the girls have a different kind of readiness about them. With their made-up faces, their up-done hair, and their belly-baring costumes, they know that there is no chance they will miss the main event — they are the main event. The girls are wearing heeled white dance shoes that are defiantly impractical for the city streets, in striking contrast to the robust sneakers that everyone else has on. (A third pair of shoes, mysteriously discarded, arrests the eye. The wrong size? Who knows?) The girls’ pristine shoes, soon to be scuffed and dirtied as they dance up the spine of their city, mark their young wearers as something Mark respectfully recognizes: fellow-artists of the street.
MEM didn’t intend to be illustrating a freak show, but to be chronicling the marginalized, the dispossessed, and the rejected, drawing us in to appreciate how they compose ways of living in often drastic circumstances; to grant them their humanity; and, sometimes, to celebrate them.
And so you wonder about Candice and Fantashia, who would now be in their early 30s; what has become of them?
[Note: the Puerto Rican Day Parade takes place on the second Sunday in June along 5th Avenue in NYC. Meanwhile, Americans in general will soon celebrate Puerto Rico: in the halftime show of Superbowl LX, on 2/8/26, anchored by an exceptional mainland performance by Bad Bunny. Note for the drastically ill-informed: Puerto Ricans are American citizens.]
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