Unpublished in Italy, this volume presents seventy photographs introduced by a text from the curator Caroline Bénichou and accompanied by updated biographical and bibliographical notes. From the circus acrobats of Indian Circus to the Indian prostitutes of Falkland Road, from Hollywood stars shot on the sets of Federico Fellini, Luis Buñuel or Francis Ford Coppola to the psychiatric hospital of Ward 81, Mary Ellen Mark (1940-2015) never stopped turning her singular eye on the world. Cinema and photography both feed on the visible: without a referent there is no image, and the image arises from the simultaneous presence of subject, camera and photographer. The way she came close to the world is above all a closeness to people, and in her work the physical, involved nearness to others is strikingly plain. There is no wish to show the exotic, the extraordinary or the monstrous, and nothing is driven by an event: only the endlessly renewed experience of the presence of others in their daily lives, caught in their social setting and held still in the flatness of a photograph. Her work is hard to label, because she always stood at the border between reportage, documentary photography and portraiture; one might risk calling her a social portraitist, and it is in that particular gift for seizing reality, at the crossing of genres, that the pull of her pictures lies.