Margaret Morton (Née Willis; October 16, 1948 – June 27, 2020) was an American photographer, author, and professor of visual arts. 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. Early life and education Morton was born on October 16, 1948, in Akron, Ohio. She attended Kent State University, graduating in 1970. In 1971, Morton married Thomas Judson Morton, and the two later divorced. She then became a graduate student at The Yale University School of Art, and obtained an MFA in 1977. Career In 1980 Morton moved to New York City and became an instructor at Cooper Union. She was promoted to tenured professor in the School of Art there in 1985. Throughout 1989, Morton walked past a large semi-permanent community of homeless people in Tompkins Square Park during her regular commute, and she became interested in the topic of homelessness in New York City. 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 was initially interested primarily in the structures that made up the physical community, but she became increasingly interested in the people there, and when the community was broken up she remained in contact with many of the people who had lived there. Some of those people continued to be featured in her photographs as they dispersed throughout the city, forming the basis for Morton's decades-long interest in photographing and interviewing the homeless people of New York City. An exhibit of Morton's work depicting homeless people in New York City was held at the Wave Hill garden, and led to the book 1993 Transitory Gardens, Uprooted Lives featuring photographs by Morton and text written by Diana Balmori. In 1995, Morton published her second book, called The Tunnel: The Underground Homeless of New York City. The Tunnel is a collection of photographs