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Remembering Mark Jury
16 September 2024
Mark Jury passed away from heart failure late last month in Scranton, Pa. He was 80.
Jury was born on the Fourth of July 4 in Monterey, Calif., where his father, Mark was deployed during World War II. However, the family soon moved to Fort Wayne, Ind., where his father worked for the Red Cross and his mother Anna ran the household.
Jury enrolled at Indiana University and at the University of St. Francis, in Fort Wayne, but left school to travel, eventually launching a career as a freelance magazine photographer.
But when he started getting induction notices from the Army, he decided to enlist rather than get drafted so he might have some say in what he did. Based on his experience with a camera, the Army assigned him to be a combat photographer.
That experience led to his first photobook in 1971, The Vietnam Photo Book, which documented what he called "the first and only rock 'n' roll war," a war marked for Americans by debauchery, moral corruption and the desperation to survive. The Americans fought well, he later wrote, but were frequently drunk or stoned with peace signs and long hair proliferating.
His war images were inspired by his admiration for Robert Capa. So after he returned home, he visited Capa's brother Cornell, who was himself a well-known photographer, for advice.
Capa introduced him to his own editor who helped him publish his images as a book, excerpted in Look magazine. The first run of 15,000 sold out and the book was among the top 10 stolen titles at Cornell University.
In 1976, he published a second photobook title Gramps, which was documented his maternal grandfather's struggle with dementia, which he wrote with his brother Dan. Translated in eight languages, the book became a best seller.
In a review for the New York Times, Anatole Broyard wrote:
Their book shows us how, after all our emancipation, we still live in terror of the physical. Love, they imply, must be able to conquer disgust. Facing our disgust, coming to terms with it, is almost as important as facing our death.
He wrote a third photobook, which he titled Playtime! in 1977), about American leisure activities. His photobooks ensured him of a long career as a magazine photographer.
But he also expanded into documentary filmmaking with his brother Dan. They produced Chillysmith Farm in 1981 about their grandfather, and Dances Sacred and Profane in 1985 about American subcultures.
In the early 1990s, Jury began to suffer from late-onset post-traumatic stress disorder as Vietnam caught up to him, as he put it. He pulled himself out of a destructive downward spiral in the late 2010s.
He married Delores Vinson, who survives him, in 1968. He is survived by two daughters, two sons, eight grandchildren, two brothers and his sister.