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Mary Ellen Mark, an American photojournalist, died this year at age 75, from bone cancer. After studying art and photography in college, Mark had a remarkable career creating photo essays that documented people on the margins of society. Her first book of photographs was published after she spent a year in Turkey on a Fulbright scholarship. In addition, the Fulbright program gives students from around the world the chance to study at American universities. Later she would go on to take pictures of heroin addicts in London, prostitutes in Bombay and patients in an Oregon mental hospital. She would often spend weeks or even months on site, getting to know her subjects so that they would trust her enough to open up. Mark’s work often featured children, and one of her best-known photographs shows a nine-year-old girl from North Carolina standing in a small swimming pool. Her face made up like an adult’s, she is smoking a cigarette and glaring defiantly at the camera. Another features a family of four living in their car. As with many of Mark’s best photos, the viewer feels both shock and empathy, as well as a curiosity about who these people were and how they ended up there. Doing this kind of work required bravery, and Mark’s friends describe her as a “fierce, passionate and utterly generous” person. Her photos are not didactic or moralizing, but they awaken an interest in people who may not be as lucky as we are.