Mary Ellen Mark

Known for: documentary portraits of American social margins

Mary Ellen Mark spent five decades documenting people living at the edges of American society, from runaways on the streets of Seattle to patients in a locked psychiatric ward in Oregon. Her book Ward 81 (1979) and her long relationship with the subjects of Streetwise — which began as a Life assignment in 1983 — are among the most sustained examples of participatory documentary photography. She received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of Media Photographers in 2014.