Documentary photographer Mary Ellen Mark dies in N.Y. at 75

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.

She died Monday at a New York hospital after a long battle with a blood illness caused by bone marrow failure, her close friend Kelly Cutrone said.

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 on Blackwell photographed over decades is yet to be published, titled Tiny: Streetwise Revisited.

The photographer, a Pennsylvania native, chose Seattle "because it is known as 'America's most livable city,'" she wrote in the preface to her book on the subject. "By choosing America's ideal city we were making the point: 'If street kids exist in a city like Seattle then they can be found everywhere in America, and we are therefore facing a major social problem of runaways in this country.'"

Mark's work appeared in prominent publications including Life, the New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair. She also published 18 books.

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