Mary Ellen Mark and Karen Folger Jacobs - Ward 81: Voices

Edited by Martin Bell, Julia Bezgin, Meredith Lue. Text by Karen Folger Jacobs, Kaitlin Booher, Miloš Forman, Max Houghton, Gaëlle Morel, Paul Roth.

Photographed in 1976, Ward 81 was Mary Ellen Mark’s (1940–2015) first independent long-term project. Mark and writer Karen Folger Jacobs (born 1940) set out to document the lives of the women in this locked ward at the Oregon State Hospital in Salem—the only one in the state. Every day for five weeks, Mark photographed and Jacobs interviewed the women on Ward 81. At night they slept in an empty adjacent ward.

2023; hardcover; 12 x 12 inches; 288 pages, 141 bw; ISBN: 9783969990131.