Born in Ohio and trained at the Yale School of Art, Margaret Morton (1948-2020) was a Professor of Art at Cooper Union for thirty years. She is best known for chronicling New York City’s homeless communities for nearly two decades. Combining her elegant, perceptive photographs with transcribed interviews, she produced four books that bear witness and advocate for people without housing. In 2014, she published Cities of the Dead: The Ancestral Cemeteries of Kyrgyzstan. At her death, she was completing a book on Manhattan's Old Farley Post Office, which she photographed for two years during its renovation as the Moynihan Train Hall. 

Margaret and I were good friends. I followed her work since 1989, when I was Curator of Prints and Photographs at the Museum of the City of New York and she invited me to her first exhibition of photographs of homes built by people then living in Tompkins Square Park, across the street from her apartment. In 2002, when she was leaving for Kyrgyzstan, she asked me if I would be executor of her estate with hopes that I could arrange to place her work in public collections. I agreed, and we spoke about it only a couple of times thereafter.

In June 2020, Margaret died unexpectedly, and although it has taken time, I have set up the Margaret Morton Archive, the first step toward fulfilling her wishes. In April 2022, I leased a space at Mana Contemporary in Jersey City for the archive and have hired Stephanie Neel and Xuemeng Zhang to organize and digitize the work. Please see https://www.margaretmorton.org/ for more information.