Who

A contributing photographer for The New Yorker, Mark is known for her affecting portraits of the downtrodden and, occasionally, the rich and famous.

Backstory

Philadelphia native Mark moved to New York in 1967 and began taking photographs in Central Park and Times Square. Her big break arrived in 1973, when she got a job as the still photographer on Milos Forman's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and ended up spending her spare time photographing the female inmates of the asylum the movie was filmed in. Since then, she's taken photographs for a long list of publications including Life, Rolling Stone, and the New Yorker, using photography to explore social issues like prostitution, poverty and drug addiction. She's taken disquieting photos of streetwalkers in Bombay, street kids in Seattle, the homeless in Los Angeles, and starving children in Ethiopia; she's also published more than a dozen books of photography, most recently a retrospective, Exposure, in 2005. In recent years, she's continued to feature the destitute in her work, but has also dabbled in lighter fare, documenting ordinary people and celebrities. Mark is represented by Chelsea gallerist Marianne Boesky.

Personal

Mark is married to Martin Bell, who directed the Oscar-winning documentary Streetwise, based on Mark's photo essay on runaway children in Seattle. They have no children, and bought a Greene Street condo for $1.7 million in 2001.

True story

Mark and her husband once offered to adopt a child prostitute called "Tiny" who was featured in Mark's Seattle street-children series in the early 1980s. The young girl refused, although Mark and her husband have stayed in touch with her over the years, and Mark returned to Seattle in 1999 for a follow-up photo shoot.