Margaret Morton

Margaret Morton (Née Willis; October 16, 1948 – June 27, 2020) was an American photographer, author and professor. She was a School of Art Professor at Cooper Union. For several decades beginning in the late 1980s, Morton's body of work largely depicted communities of homeless people in New York City. She published a number of photo collections in books, usually supplemented by detailed interviews with the photos' subjects. Her work was noted for depicting human stories within communities that were both highly structured and quite temporary, often shortly before their forcible destruction by New York Cities authorities. Her success in documenting poverty in New York City has been compared to the work of Jacob Riis. She attended Kent State University, graduating in 1970. This community was the subject of many of her photographs during 1989, until it was destroyed by the New York Police Department within a year. Morton demonstrates that the community was highly structured, with strong norms of privacy, established purposes for different parts of the space, sources of income and exchange, and relationships among members of the community living in the tunnel. The book included an introduction from Alan Trachtenberg and extensive commentary by the people who built the structures and lived in them, and was described as "haunting" in Publishers Weekly. The resulting collection of photographs was exhibited at The Architectural League of New York. She later returned to Kyrgyzstan to photograph a variety of cemeteries, focusing on the analogy between cemeteries and cities, as well as the substantial temporal and spatial variation in the appearance of Kygryz cemeteries. Morton died on June 27, 2020, at her home in New York City, as a result of leukemia.

Selected works Transitory Gardens, Uprooted Lives (1993) The Tunnel: The Underground Homeless of New York City (1995) Fragile Dwelling (2000) Glass House (2004) Cities of the Dead: The Ancestral Cemeteries of Kyrgyzstan (2014)