Mary Ellen Mark viewed mental illness with compassion. Her photos make sure we do, too.

In 1975, Mary Ellen Mark accepted a weeklong photo assignment that would change her life.

Already a celebrated photographer for her portraits of rock stars and actors, Mark was scheduled to do more of the same on the Oregon set of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” And that she did, capturing star Jack Nicholson and producer Michael Douglas at the mental institution where the movie takes place.

Then, while on set, she met the women of Ward 81, the only high-security mental institution housing women in Oregon. Captivated by their stories, she convinced the warden to let her return the following year with therapist Karen Folger Jacobs. The pair would embed in the unit for six weeks, and capture the stories of women who were locked away and invisible to much of the nation.

The result is “Ward 81,” a searing photography exhibit that has been at University of Maryland, Baltimore County’s Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery since late January and is leaving on Friday.

The trust Mark and Jacobs established with the women is evident in the intimacy throughout the black-and-white photos in the airy gallery. Mark shows close-ups of ankles in shackles. She shows hands restraining a patient undergoing electroconvulsive therapy, which the patients abhor. She captures tiny moments of friendship and joy: a cigarette dangling from a painted lip; a young woman submerging in a bath.

The photos allowed Americans to imagine the inner lives of women locked away, said Tara Pixley, a photojournalist and assistant professor of journalism at Temple University. Over time, the images became one of many factors that pushed society toward therapy and medication at home or in outpatient facilities instead of institutionalization — just as the tenement photos of Jacob Riis propelled changes in housing policies.

“‘Ward 81′ was unlike anything that had come out before it,” Pixley said. “The work was so groundbreaking and it connected people in such a meaningful way that it really did make things possible that wouldn’t otherwise have been possible.”

“Ward 81″ also includes testimonials.

“I used to be able to imagine beautiful things, but my imagination is just gone,” a woman named Beth said. “It just doesn’t work anymore. Maybe I’ve been in here too long.”

Another woman, Tommie, said: “They treat you like you’re no good. What they’re saying is, you’re in a mental hospital and therefore, you’re stupid ... you’re ugly, and you’re no good, and you don’t belong in this world.”

Mark provided Polaroids so the women could see themselves as she saw them. For Mark Swartz, who visited the exhibit, that detail was one of the most tender touches.

“You can tell this is someone who is concerned about how people in our country have disabilities and how they struggle,” said Swartz, who was familiar with Mark’s famous photographs of twins from his former job in the marketing department for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

Mark published “Ward 81″ as a book in 1978. From 200 rolls of film, she carefully selected images that showed the complexity of being locked up in the prime of one’s life.

Institutionalized men received individual treatment; women, on the other hand, were treated in groups. Both the 1975 Nicholson film and Mark’s photographs depicted the horror of electroconvulsive shock therapy, or ECT, and led to changes in how doctors administered it and when. Though still used today, it’s less common and more tailored for the most severe and medication-resistant mental health conditions.

Mark, who died in 2015 at 75, published 20 books and won nearly every prestigious photojournalism honor, including multiple Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the George Eastman House. She and her husband, Martin Bell, turned her photo essay on runaway children in Seattle into the Academy Award-nominated film “Streetwise.” Bell continues to keep her work in circulation, but the UMBC exhibit is the only show listed for 2026.

Emily Hauver, UMBC’s curator of exhibitions, and Beth Saunders, curator of special collections, saw the “Ward 81″ exhibition when it was first presented in 2023 at the Image Centre in Toronto. From there, the pair worked with a team to bring the exhibit to UMBC.

Saunders said the show has been popular. Students come through before or after studying or grabbing coffee, and often share their own or their families’ mental health struggles with the curators on site.

“It’s clear that the photographs and the women in them have had an emotional impact on our visitors,” Saunders said.

Kaitlin Booher, an Ohio-based curator who helped organize Mark’s Toronto show, said “Ward 81″ is significant because Mark encountered the women so early in her career, and “that set the pace for how she would photograph women for the rest of her life, all over the world.”

Mark grew up in Pittsburgh and became close with Candice Bergen while they were among the few women studying photography at the University of Pennsylvania in the early 1960s. Mark said her own father suffered mental breakdowns, which may explain her affinity for the Ward 81 women.

A narrated film at UMBC brings to life these women once forgotten; letters from their parents remind viewers that they were once loved. Mark told Time Magazine in 1978 that the photos were like a scrapbook, in her life and in their own.

“I wanted to help these women make contact with the outside world by letting them reach out and present themselves,” Mark said. “I didn’t want to use them. I wanted them to use me.”