Photographer Mary Ellen Mark’s New Book "Prom" by Getty Publications

May 17, 2012 - PRLog -- The Wall Street Journal reported recently that limos have been replaced by double-decker party busses as the prom night transportation of choice. This news may help explain why the average prom now costs American teenagers (and their families) over a thousand dollars, up $200 since 2011. The teenage rite of passage is now being marketed as “the new wedding,” notes Time magazine’s Moneyland blog. Proms are glitziest in the Northeast, compared to less extravagant affairs in the South and Midwest. Yet data gathered by VISA show that it is often families in the poorest financial condition that spend the most lavishly on proms.

Photographer Mary Ellen Mark’s new book Prom (Getty Publications) puts this kind of economic and cultural information on full display. But photography being photography, and Mary Ellen Mark being Mary Elle Mark, there is much more to see and muse over. The book, and an accompanying film made by Mark’s husband, Martin Bell, do more than document the details of prom night—the girls in plunging necklines and the boys in ill-fitting tuxedos, the corsages and crowns. In her photographs these high school students are seen slipping out of adolescence and into the accoutrements of adulthood. There is poignancy in the way they pose, or posture, before Mark and the imposing Polaroid 20x24 camera she used for the project. Their faces offer hints about who they are and where they come from, but their futures remain a mystery.

Mark and Bell traveled to 13 proms across the United States from 2006 to 2009, along with a mighty collection of studio lighting equipment, the giant Polaroid camera, and precious stocks of Polapan 20x24 film. “The camera was flown to the various locations,” Mark told me recently, “but the film can’t be flown—the chemicals in it react at high altitude.”

A great deal of the interest in the photos comes from the way Mark’s subjects confront the camera. “I didn’t direct them to do anything in particular,” she said. “People come up with better ideas than I could ever think of.” Cultural and economic differences can be discerned in the dress and body language of Mark’s subjects. Yet ultimately it is the tender similarities as much as the differences in clothes or attitudes that emerge. “All proms have the same spirit,” said Mark. “The individuals are different of course. The kids from expensive private schools and the kids who don’t come from great privilege are different. They’ve had a tougher road. But the spirit of the prom is the same. You really see that more in the film than in the photographs.”