Margaret Morton (photographer)

Margaret Morton (born Willis; born October 16, 1948 in Akron , Ohio , USA ; † June 27, 2020 in New York City , USA) was an American photographer , author and professor of graphic design and photography. In the late 1980s, Morton began to document the coexistence of several communities of homeless people in New York City in long-term projects . The social documentary photographs of homelessness and poverty in New York City took Morton to public parks, to vacant urban lots, to underground tunnels. Her work has been published in five books, numerous newspapers such as the New York Times , Washington Post or The Atlantic , museums and exhibitions. Morton's photographic work has been compared with those of Jacob August Riis , Lewis Hine , Gordon Parks , Dorothea Lange , Milton Rogovin and Jacob Holdt .

Life

Margaret Willis (Morton) was born on October 16, 1948 in Akron, Ohio. Her mother, Ruth Willis (nee McFarland) was an elementary school teacher; her father, Arthur Willis, taught product design in a high school . Margaret grew up with her sister Judith ("Joe") in Akron, Summit County , in east Ohio. After graduating from Cuyahoga Falls High School (CFHS) (see Wiki) in Cuyahoga Falls in 1966 , she studied at Kent State University and graduated here in 1970. A year later, in 1971, she married the architect Thomas Judson Morton. The couple divorced again. Margaret Morton then took up a graduate degree at the Yale School of Art (see also Wiki). In 1977 she received her Master of Fine Arts (MFA) from this university and subsequently taught graphic design here . In 1980 she moved to New York and taught at Cooper Union (The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art). In 1985 she was promoted to full professor of graphic design and photography at the School of Arts of that college. She served on the Cooper Union faculty for nearly 40 years. In 2018 she withdrew from teaching.

The Tunnel (1995)

In 1995, Morton published her second book, The Tunnel: The Underground Homeless of New York City (The Tunnel. The Homeless in the New York City Underground) . The book was about one of the oldest homeless communities in a four-kilometer-long disused railway tunnel under the magnificent Upper West Side , on the banks of the Hudson , which had remained undiscovered for more than 20 years. A "shared flat" of around 50 people was set up in niches, storage rooms or between the tracks, in the shelter and in the darkness of the tunnel. Morton took pictures of and interviews with the homeless (“tunnel people”) in a long-term project from 1991 to 1995. "It's very, very cold down there and very, very dark - you can feel the blackness, and after my excursions I was completely exhausted because I had to use all my senses so much", Morton reported about her descent into the "underworld" . Morton showed that the community was highly regulated, with strict norms, well-defined purposes for different parts of the space, sources of income and exchange, and relationships between members of the community. Shortly thereafter, this community of homeless people was evicted from the tunnel after Amtrak decided to resume use.

Glass House (2004)

In 2004, Morton released Glass House , a documentary about a community of teenage squatters who lived in an abandoned glass factory on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. United by the need for community, a strong work ethic and iron rules, they transformed the dilapidated ruin into the house they called the “glass house”. The group repaired stairs and roof beams with wood they got from construction sites and police barricades, obtained electricity from a street lamp and water from a nearby fire hydrant. Finally, they equipped the buildings with a communal kitchen, library, and separate living areas for each member of the house. “In 1993 I heard from a former squatter at the Glass House, and we then met with the entire community. They invited me to attend house meetings on Sunday evenings and Thursday working days, and to meet with individual members to take photos and record their stories. I have seen firsthand their ingenuity and extraordinary collaborative skills. ”(Margaret Morton) On February 1, 1994, the New York Police Department evicted the homeless community from the factory building. Today the building is home to low-income people living with HIV / AIDS. Writer Luc Sante notes, "Even though we've known all along that the story will end with a forcible eviction, it is still shocking until the end." Morton viewed her book as a document about a most unusual community that did disappeared completely from the East Village through the process of gentrification soon after the book was published .

Cities of the Dead. Kyrgyzstan (2014)

In July 2006, Morton accompanied Virlana Tkacz (see Wiki), theater director and head of the La MaMa Experimental Theater Club (see Wiki) ( Off-Off-Broadway ) in Manhattan's East Village , on her trip to Kyrgyzstan. Tkacz had invited Morton to photograph places referenced in a Kyrgyz poem that she wanted to develop into a play. On one of her exploratory trips, Morton thought he saw a city in the distance, which however turned out to be a city of the dead, a Kyrgyz ancestral cemetery, with impressive buildings for the dead. Morton was initially fascinated by aesthetics. However, after realizing that these cemeteries were impressive fossils of Kyrgyzstan's multicultural past, which included nomadic , Islamic and Soviet elements, she returned to Kyrgyzstan two more times to photograph the very different cemeteries in each part of the country. The book Cities of the Dead, published in 2014 . The Ancestral Cemeteries of Kyrgyzstan (Cities of the Dead: The Ancestral Cemeteries of Kyrgyzstan ) showed the beauty and uniqueness of these tombs in the middle of the grandiose landscape of Kyrgyzstan.

Works

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

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Magaret Morton - Homesite
2. ↑ ^{a b c d} The New York Times August 5, 2020: Margaret Morton, Photographer at Home With the Homeless, Dies at 71
3. ^ Thomas Judson Morton
4. ^ Yale School of Arts - Home site
5. ↑ Legacy: Margaret R. Morton 1948-2020
6. ^ Die Zeit, September 24, 1993: Dreaming of a rainproof roof
7. ↑ New York Times November 7, 2004: The Real 'Rent' (by Margaret Morton)
8. ↑ Smithsonian Magazine April 9, 2015: Kyrgyzstan's Otherworldly Cities of the Dead (Interview with M. Morton (+ photographs)
9. ↑ YouTube March 25, 2014: Cities of the Dead: The Ancestral Cemeteries of Kyrgyzstan. By Margaret Morton
10. ↑ eurasianet April 22, 2011: Kyrgyzstan: Cemeteries Give a Snapshot of History