Between 2006 and 2009, Mary Ellen Mark photographed prom-goers at thirteen schools across the United States, from New York City and Charlottesville to Houston and Los Angeles. Published by Getty Publications in 2012, Prom considers the high-school dance as both a shared American rite and a brief, highly charged stage on which young people present themselves at the threshold of adulthood. The participants come from varied backgrounds, preventing the occasion from being reduced to a single social type or regional experience.

Mark made the portraits with a Polaroid 20×24 Land camera, a demanding large-format instrument whose scale encourages close attention to gesture, clothing, posture, and the negotiations that occur between individuals and the lens. Across 127 photographs, couples and groups appear dressed for ceremony while retaining the uncertainty, humor, composure, and vulnerability of adolescence. The pictures are not merely a survey of formal attire; together they examine how identity is performed within a familiar social ritual.

Statements drawn from interviews with the students interrupt the photographic sequence. Their remarks—by turns funny and affecting—introduce ambitions, anxieties, and expectations that cannot be read from appearances alone. Mark’s husband, filmmaker Martin Bell, produced and directed a companion film from these encounters, included with the book on DVD. This collaboration creates a productive movement between the concentrated still portrait and the more discursive forms of speech and film.

For a photobook collection, Prom merits attention as a sustained portrait project in which subject, photographic method, text, and moving image are closely coordinated. Its importance lies less in prom as spectacle than in the book’s precise record of American youth at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Mark treats a conventional celebration as a temporary social theatre, preserving the ways its participants wished to be seen while allowing their own words to complicate the image.