This extraordinary portrait of the internationally notorious street of prostitutes, Falkland Road in Bombay, is by the brilliant Magnum photographer whose work has been exhibited around the world and published in major magazines from LIFE and LOOK to GEO, STERN, and PARIS MATCH. Over the last ten years, during which she traveled extensively through India, Mary Ellen Mark found herself returning again and again to her image of Falkland Road and to her desire to capture on film its life and feeling.

The street is lined with old wooden buildings, cage-like structures on the ground floor--with girls everywhere: on steps, behind the bars of windows, 11-year-old girls to 65-year-old ex-madams. The street is like any busy lower-class street in Bombay...vendors, merchants, shops everywhere. From sunrise to sunset customers survey the cage girls...

At last, during a stay of six weeks, Mary Ellen Mark was able to earn the trust and acceptance of the people of Falkland Road. These 65 photographs--beautiful, electric, shocking, remarkable for their emotional power and for the visceral brilliance of their color--are the result. They show us the daily life lived by the women (and men) of the street.

Among them: the beautiful 17-year-old Asha (she hated being a prostitute and dreamed of being a servant but was afraid no one would hire her)...Putla, 13, sold to the brothel by her mother...Saroja, a corpulent madam draped in glittering reds and oranges, surrounded by her girls and looking like an ancient idol...3-year-old Mari, playing in the small, cramped room where his mother lives and works ("he says 'so many aunties and uncles'")...Champa, the transvestite madam...Munni, a 15-year-old girl, once a beggar ("the name tattooed on my arm is the only thing I can bring with me to my death").

Together these pictures and Mary Ellen Mark's captions and introductory text provide an astonishing revelation of Falkland Road. A world unto itself--raw, frightening--is made accessible by the completeness of the photographer's involvement, by her humanity, and by the way she captures the variety of individual life and the color, passion, and tenderness that still abide there