NEW YORK — Documentary photographer Mary Ellen Mark, called “a snake charmer of the soul” for her gift of capturing searing images of human vulnerability, has died at age 75.
Mark’s subjects ranged from runaway children and heroin addicts to celebrities and world leaders. She also pointed her lens at members of the Ku Klux Klan, a women’s security ward in a mental institution and various celebrities.
Over the decades, “what resulted was, in fact, a lamentation: one of the most delicately shaded studies of vulnerability ever set on film,” wrote the late Time magazine art critic Robert Hughes.
A collection of Mark photographs in a book titled “Streetwise” documents the life of Tiny Blackwell, a Seattle prostitute and drug addict Mark met in the 1980s when Tiny was 13. A new book, titled “Tiny: Streetwise Revisited,” is yet to be published.
