Marking the Grace of Circus

The acrobat is a shaman. She turns and the world shifts. She flips and, balancing on one hand, the transformation is complete.

The Indian circus is a slipping, shifting world too, in danger of disappearing, teetering on the cusp of change, seen now as insufficiently modern, as part of an old-fashioned India. But if all the circuses in India close, if the tents are folded and all the cages emptied, a whole world will end.

John Irving wrote a brief foreword to Indian Circus, Mary Ellen Mark’s remarkable, recent book of photographs. Having himself just completed a book set largely in India he could describe that country with some authority. He chose the words chaos and turmoil, and for the circuses inside that country—oasis and cloister.

Mary Ellen Mark works inside; that’s her practice. I think of her Falkland Road project, photographs of Bombay prostitutes. To get the photographs she paced the street, present and persistent, waiting to be trusted, to be taken inside. I think of one photograph from this sequence where women sit looking out at the crush of activity on Falkland Road from an upper level window. Two of the women looking through the window are employed there—a madam and one of her girls. The other woman watching the street, looking at the buses and cars and clients is the photographer. Three women look through the window of a brothel in Bombay. That’s how Mary Ellen Mark works; not invisible and elusive like Cartier-Bresson and not covert and quick like Robert Frank.

The Indian Circus work was initiated 20 years ago on Mark’s first trip to India. It began, she tells us, with her falling in love with the country and the circus, and with her conviction that she would return and direct her photographic attention to this topic. She began in earnest in 1989. The photographs are inside, backstage photographs of people, often children, working grindingly hard. What she shows us are the sleeping quarters, the exercise lots, the training mats. We see the fatigue, the relentless training, the waiting, the brief respite of ease. There’s the unguarded intimacy of sleep, the private pleasure of watching make-up being applied, hair combed, costumes buttoned—it’s the unpainted side of the scrims and we’re there.

John Irving’s words—cloister and oasis—are chosen because, for most of its members the circus is a sanctuary and a world. A world where dwarfs are integral, where young girls without dowries are plastic ladies, contortionists or aerial performers and not street beggars or prostitutes.

In the stunning photograph, Usman at Jumbo Circus, Mangalore, 1989, a dwarf straddles this capacious globe. The light is dusky, showing through what might be backdrops on a stage. Supports, struts and frames form a jumble in the background. The middle ground is held on one side by a hippo nosing the ground. His hide glistens and steam rises from his freshly washed body. The misted, evanescent space around him glows. On the other side a collective of pure white pelicans almost evenly balances the tilt. In the middle foreground is Usman, stocky legs planted, handsome large head angled to one side. The edges of the photograph are curved, confirming that the Jumbo Circus, Mangalore is indeed a world and the dwarf Usman stands at its crown.

The nature of this world—illusion, transformation, balance—is about slip and change. Contortionists, acrobats, trapeze artists—the book’s pages amaze and make anxious. The exquisite little Jyotsana riding an elephant’s trunk presses her cheek against its curl, one hand hooked just under its nozzle, her other hand a tight fist. The elephant’s eye is half closed (I read pleasure), her eyes are open and wary. A young woman in a sequined costume leans forward and left. The child balancing, head on her head, leans a little to the right. Dodging, shifting too, you watch. In another remarkable photograph a solid young woman stands in profile, her arms stretched parallel to the ground. She holds a rigid, S-shaped device in her teeth. A tiny girl curled like a six holds the other end in her teeth, and mouths full, jaws tense, one levitates over the other, the little girl, her arms out, appearing to be a bird passing low overhead. The earliest photograph in the book, Bombay 1974, is of a contortionist in silver spangles. Like one of Rodin’s drawn naked dancers she stands on one leg. The other is pulled vertically over her head and locked in place by her arm. The other arm, parallel to the ground, points off the photograph’s frame. She is still, time is still; the photograph could be a thousand years old. Everywhere, Mark has captured the moment before the turn, before the elephant sets down his other three feet, before the pyramid of acrobats disassembles, before the top girl jumps from the shoulders of the second girl, before the practicing, hovering girls are still, before the plastic ladies unfurl, before the handstand girls flip and dust off their palms, before the dog sits down on his haunches, before the chimp climbs off his trainer’s neck. A world at once uncertain and safe.

In this world children lie asleep across beds, casual as fallen leaves, taking rest when they can, taking comfort from contact with each other. In one photograph two-young girls lay back on their bed, heads resting just at the edge. Their hair falls vertically behind them and each pulls a comb through this dark water, playing it like a musical instrument. This beautiful photograph is like and unlike Sally Mann’s photographs of her own children but in Mark’s work they are beautiful without any self-consciousness or ambiguity. In fact ambivalence is entirely absent from this work. In spite of the obvious riskiness of working with animals, of walking a high wire, of packing up and moving on and setting up again, this work is level and solid, firmly constructed on the nobility Mark sees and reflects in the Indian circuses she photographs.

As formal objects the images are surpassingly beautiful. Mark’s framing, the often angled planes, the clarity, the light, her precision so fine each piece of straw, each flicker of grass seems deliberately placed, the saturated black and white tritones—all assemble to form a body of work more thoroughly honouring its subject than any I’ve encountered.

There’s an uncontrived poignancy in much of the work. That’s not to say that these are fortunate accidents; the photographs are carefully conceived, intentional, honest and artful. Chitra, Tracy and Tulsi Das at Great Bombay Circus, Limbdi, 1990, is a remarkable composition. A transparent gauze curtain both establishes and confounds the image’s shallow plane. A diagonal seam in the curtain makes a diptych of the single space. On one side of the seam is the dwarf, Tulsi Das, wearing a checkered coat. His hat pushes the top of the frame, his shoulder nudges the seam, his thighs push at the lower edge. He’s so forward in the image it barely contains him. On the other side of the seam, still in front of the gauze curtain but pulled so far back as to be occupying an entirely different imaginative space are two small girls wearing only ruffled, spangled panties. One of the girls wraps the curtain’s edge around her. The man presses a rabbit to his chest. Everywhere it’s soft—the little girls just off focus, the diffuse light behind the curtain, the draped fabric, the quiet bemused eyes of the three figures looking off camera, the rabbit.

The young boy in Transvestite and Child Clown, Lion Circus, Bilsanda, 1989, finds his equivalent in Manet’s Fifer. In this photograph the boy sits instead of standing and no instrument occupies his hands, although a piece of bamboo rod rests beside him. He holds the space as firmly as the little soldier, his dark clothing and close-fitting cap drawing him against a grey ground. Mark’s regard makes these parallels easy—on the wall at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, on a wooden platform at the Lion Circus, Bilsanda—elegance locates itself unmindful of place.

Dignity, forbearance, grace, the photographer and her subjects alike in this extraordinary, transcendent work. ♦

Meeka Walsh edits Border Crossings.

Indian Circus by Mary Ellen Mark San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1993 Hardcover, 107 pp., $40.00