In 1976, she returned to the Oregon hospital with writer Karen Folger Jacobs and lived for more than a month with the women of the ward. "Ward 81," a collection of photographs from that period, was published as a book in 1979. It was the first of her projects to portray, in depth, people whom she feels "haven't had the best breaks in society." But her approach was strongly personal, not political or scientific. "It was a project of my own, and I just wanted to do photographs that I believed in without having any rhyme or reason or theory, or having to spell out a sort of storytelling. I wanted to show their personalities -- that was the thing that drew me to them."

"Ward 81" is the first series that makes it clear Mark has a strong ability to gain people's trust. "I didn't propose a threat to them," she says. "I think figures of authority who were outside of the ward, like the nurses or the doctors, they were a threat because they were the ones who could punish. I was just someone there documenting their lives, so it was very different. Slowly, they got used to me."

The black-and-white pictures are straightforward and often stark, but, considering the overwhelmingly depressing context, they're startlingly comfortable. Several portraits of a patient named Mary Frances show her with her knees tucked tight under her chin, looking sidelong at the camera, but another catches her, perhaps playfully, peeking over the rim of her bathtub. A handful of women smoke in a common room, dancing forlornly to records at 1 in the afternoon. Another woman named Laurie is seen in the bath naked and also covered under the sudsy water, all except her head and her hair, laid out along the rim of the tub. It might be a glamour shot.

Mark tried to treat the women and their illnesses individually, seeking out what made each of them unique. "The women had very strong personalities," she's said. "Some of them were funny, some romantic, some social. You could label them just the way you might label your friends -- that's the comedian, this is the social one. The difference was that the feelings were so much more exaggerated. There's no bullshit; the emotions are pure."

In late 1978, Mark returned to India, which she had visited many times since the late '60s, to photograph the prostitutes of Falkland Road, in Bombay. The street is lined with four- and five-story houses, each with several madams and dozens of prostitutes, some as young as 11. Mark had begun the project on each of her previous visits, but always encountered strong resistance, in the form of verbal abuse and showers of garbage, mostly from the women who were relegated to the ground-level "cages," tiny rooms with metal bars.

This time, however, she gained the trust of some street prostitutes who didn't work for the madams, and of a small group of transvestite prostitutes who quickly took to the idea of being photographed. With this acceptance, and her determination to live with these people and finish her work, the hostility ended; the women were curious, and two madams asked her to stay with them for days and weeks at a time.

"I made friends with many of the women," Mark says. "They were very protective of me. As a matter of fact, once there was a police raid and they hid me under one of the beds. They were protective of me around the customers and people that might be dangerous. And they were genuine friends. I would work all afternoon, then I'd go have dinner in the little restaurants on the street, and I could leave my cameras, bag, everything there with the women and nothing would ever be taken or touched. I trusted them totally."

Mark's color photographs of Falkland Road are different in many ways from "Ward 81." Showing both the interiors of the brothels and the squalid atmosphere of the street, they are often less focused on personality and more concerned with culture and type. And the colors themselves - the greens and purples and blues and reds of the peeling paint and beautiful woven clothing - can serve to decentralize a picture.

"The difficulty with color," Mark has noted, "is to go beyond the fact that it's color - to have it be not just a colorful picture but really be a picture about something. It's difficult. So often color gets caught up in color, and it becomes merely decorative."

"Falkland Road: Prostitutes of Bombay" was published in 1981, but Mark returned to India in January 1980, a year after she left Bombay, when she finally got the chance to photograph Mother Teresa and the poor she cared for at the Missions of Charity in Calcutta. Because she was on assignment for Life, Mark's first pictures appeared in July 1980, as "Teresa of the Slums: A Saintly Nun Embraces India's Poor." But her project wasn't complete. So she returned to Calcutta a year later to stay for two months.

The pictures made at Nirmal Hriday, the Home for the Dying; Nirmala Kennedy Center, a home for retarded and homeless women; Shanti Nagar (Peace) Village, a leprosy hospital; and other centers combine the approaches Mark took at the mental hospital and at the brothels: "It was an extraordinary experience," Mark says about this time in India. "It was done in the early '80s, when access was easier, especially to institutions. I was given complete access to all the different mission houses, and I knew the people, which I think is very important. Especially in a place like the Home for the Dying, where people are really ill and some of them die, you go back day after day, so when someone dies it's someone that you knew. You're not just running in and taking someone's picture who's in a bad situation."

Mark used black and white here, and her compositions, while not usually straight portraits, don't seem as random as at Falkland Road. The reduction to shades of gray immediately intensifies the experience: We know the walls and robes are white and there are accents of blue, and the light coming through the windows and open doorways is probably warm, but all that information is stripped away, and we're forced to focus on the severity of the metal cots, the thinness of arms and legs, the large, crying eyes of a girl who wants only to get out, the solitude of patients with leprosy. With the Missions of Charity series, Mark's style grew in clarity and power.

In the '80s, her singular point of view was put to work on innumerable magazine assignments, which led to two more significant personal projects. In April 1983, Mark and reporter Cheryl McCall traveled to Seattle to document the lives of street kids for Life magazine -- more than a dozen very young prostitutes, pimps and hustlers. The story ran in July 1983 as "Streets of the Lost: Runaway Kids Eke Out a Mean Life in Seattle."

When the magazine assignment was completed, Mark and McCall, together with Mark's husband, Martin Bell, a filmmaker, raised money to go back to Seattle in late August to film the various stories of the kids they had befriended. During that time, Mark continued to take her own still photographs. This group of pictures, published in 1988 as "Streetwise" (also the name of the film), is once again different in important ways from Mark's earlier work. Because she focused closely on about a half-dozen kids, the photographs are much more narrative and emotionally intense.

The strongest images are those of a 14-year-old named Erin Blackwell, or "Tiny," who was just beginning to turn tricks, or as she and her friends called them, "dates." Tiny is seen on the street, ready for work, looking much older than 14, and then at home in regular kid clothes, looking no more than 12. She is the most photogenic of all the teens, but that's not the only reason her pictures are so compelling.

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