Mary Ellen Mark took these images 45 years ago, when strict standards for privacy and photographing vulnerable people, particularly children, did not exist as they do today.

Meredith Lue, president of the Mary Ellen Mark Foundation told CNN via video call that the photographer, who experienced a challenging family life in her youth, found herself gravitating toward — and connecting with — people in vulnerable situations.

The night before starting her six-week-long assignment for GEO magazine (a German monthly much like National Geographic), she had a dream in which she was a voyeur hiding behind a bed, watching three sex workers make love.

Her closest confidante in the community was a trans madam named Champa, who introduced Mark to the sex workers at their brothel, many of them eunuchs, who allowed her to photograph them putting on makeup and getting ready for the evening.

The most challenging group to befriend were the “cage girls” — women put on display on Falkland Road in small roadside rooms with window bars who suffered frequent abuse and ridicule, often from the customers they were tasked with luring.

(After Mark and her husband, American documentary filmmaker Martin Bell, returned to Mumbai years later to show the woman the book, she appeared frail due to what they believed to be AIDS.