‘Beautiful, engaging and impossible to forget’: Mary Ellen Mark and her most intimate subject

Mary Ellen Mark was the kind of photographer who pushed the limits. Her photographs were at times shocking, emotional, and hard to look at but above all else, they were intimate.

The iconic photographer couldn’t help but get emotionally involved in the lives of her subjects who — as The Washington Post’s Matt Schudel put it — were “human beings driven by circumstance to the ragged edges of society.”