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Two of a kind
Mark made her first visit to the ‘Twins Days’ festival in Twinsburg, Ohio, in 1998. The ‘amazing visual experience’ generated the idea of a book, and the intention of capturing the detail to emphasise likeness, along with the ‘subtle qualities that often make them so different’ suggested that the giant 20x24 Polaroid camera was the tool for the job. So, although this is a large format book (13x10in) the images are actually reduced from the originals.
In August 2001 Mark, her crew and a tonne of equipment set up a studio in the festival grounds and invited participants to be photographed, returning a year later to shoot some more. At the back of the book are short extracts from interviews with the subjects which tell us a little about them but probably more about being a twin. Most, but not all, of the subject are identical twins, and most are dressed in an identical manner. Possibly not surprising among a group prepared to attend a festival celebrating ‘twininess’, yet often rather scary, particularly in the case of the older subjects. Some of the subjects look clearly happy with their twinned state, others don’t look too sure. But there is an upside to being a twin: as 9-year-old Hayley Polen (one minute older than brother Adam) points out, ‘You always have somebody to play with if your friends are sick’.
These are pictures of that very American kind of eccentricity and, in her dedication of the book to her late friend Michael E Hoffman, Mark hopes that ‘these pictures would have made him laugh and cry’. There ain’t no doubt about it.
Twins, photographs by Mary Ellen Mark, is published by Aperture, $50, ISBN 1 931788 19 7.
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