To call Tim Hetherington a great photographer would be a mistake. That’s not how he saw it.

“If you are interested in mass communication, then you have to stop thinking of yourself as a photographer,” he told Michael Kamber in a revealing interview last year, as his documentary film “Restrepo” was about to open. “We live in a post-photographic world. If you are interested in photography, then you are interested in something — in terms of mass communication — that is past. I am interested in reaching as many people as possible.”

Mr. Hetherington and Chris Hondros were killed Wednesday in the besieged city of Misurata, Libya. Two other photographers working beside them — Guy Martin and Michael Christopher Brown — were injured.

While no career can be fairly assessed within hours of its end, there’s no question that Mr. Hetherington reached an enormous audience. He was a Vanity Fair staff member, a news photographer, a videographer, a documentary filmmaker (director, producer, cameraman), an artist, a writer and an author — among other occupations, including a turn as an investigator for the United Nations Security Council’s Liberia Sanctions Committee. Lydia Polgreen, who met Mr. Hetherington in 2005 when she was starting out as West Africa correspondent for The New York Times, said, “He was one of those rare photographers who was as much a reporter as any writer I knew.”

Yet his colleagues and friends could not help themselves on Wednesday from saying — first and foremost — that Mr. Hetherington was a great photographer.

Lynsey Addario, no stranger to the perils posed by conflict (“It’s What I Do”), remembered the day in 2007 in Afghanistan when she and Mr. Hetherington were trapped under fire. Ms. Addario was on assignment for The Times Magazine, Mr. Hetherington for Vanity Fair. “We were ambushed from both sides,” she recalled. “It was a terrifying situation. I was trying to find a place to hide, to shield myself. And I remember looking over and there was Tim — just calmly sitting up, filming the whole ambush on a video camera. And I thought to myself, ‘Oh my God, I want to be a photographer like him.’ ”

She wasn’t alone. He drew many people into his luminous circle.

His apartment building in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is a hive of energy known by its occupants as the Kibbutz. “I stayed on his couch,” Mr. Kamber said on Wednesday. “Other people stayed on his couch. It was the kind of place where we would come together and look at photos and talk about photos and look at films and edit. It was a creative hub. He was a creative center for so many photographers in New York. And he had just moved here a couple of years ago.” Mr. Hetherington was born in Liverpool, England; attended Oxford University; and had been living in London, when he wasn’t living behind rebel lines in Liberia. “He wanted to move to New York,” Mr. Kamber recalled. “He was trying to break down barriers.”

“He was a terrible cook, but he was constantly cooking for people,” Mr. Kamber said. “He would show us projects that he was working on. He always had ideas. He was conceptual. We would be hanging out there, drinking, looking at photos and dissecting what things mean. That was one of the reasons he went back to Libya: he was interested in the news coverage there and how it was affecting the public’s perception of what was going on. And he wanted to be part of that coverage.”

Besides being an inspirational force, Mr. Hetherington was also a boon companion for anyone trying to readjust to day-to-day existence in the States after the intense engagement of combat and insurrection. Samantha Appleton, a photographer and a founder of Noor, a cooperative agency, said: “Coming home is always the hardest part, you know, trying to get back into normal life. It’s a difficult thing. You gravitate towards people that have experienced the same thing and it makes coming home a lot easier — to be with friends who’ve experienced war.”

Ms. Appleton last saw Mr. Hetherington on Jan. 1. “He had broken his leg in Afghanistan when he was filming ‘Restrepo,’ and running was like rehabilitation,” she said. “He didn’t even know if he could walk again when he hurt his leg. But he started running. On New Year’s Day, we were very hung over. We went for a run across the Williamsburg Bridge. We talked about love on the way in and we talked about war on the way back.”

In 2007, Mr. Hetherington’s photograph of a soldier sinking into an embankment in the Restrepo bunker in the Korangal Valley (Slide 14) was named the World Press Photo of the Year, arguably the single most prestigious award in the field.

Yet though he had the physical stature and the good looks to have been sent by Central Casting, Mr. Hetherington did not play the role of hard-bitten cameraman parachuting from one hot spot to the next. “I could tell he wasn’t like the other photographers, who carried a couple of massive D.S.L.R.s, one on each shoulder, and shared cigarettes and war stories at the bar,” Ms. Polgreen recalled about their first meeting in Monrovia, Liberia.

“Tim had just his Hasselblad, and didn’t seem to care much for war stories,” she wrote in an e-mail. “At least not the ones the other shooters told. He was busy reporting another story, one he would tell later in his extraordinary book, ‘Long Story Bit by Bit.’ Tim had spent much more time in Liberia than any of us who flew in from time to time when the news was hot. He lived in Liberia on and off for several years, documenting with his Hasselblad the agony of war and the painful, slow reconciliations that followed.”

Given his interest in finding new means of journalistic expression, Mr. Hetherington would probably be pleased by the notion that he may be best remembered not for any single picture, but for “Restrepo,” made with Sebastian Junger. It is a documentary account of American soldiers on a tour of duty in the perilous Korangal Valley of Afghanistan from May 2007 to July 2008. (Their outpost, Restrepo, is named in honor of Pfc. Juan S. Restrepo, a medic who was killed early on.) It was nominated for an Academy Award as documentary feature this year.

“I think it was one of the few films that really showed what it’s like on the ground — accurately,” Ms. Addario said. “It shows the soldiers’ perspective. It was sensitively done. It was funny. It was real. It was a compelling narrative. Tim knew how to tell a story.”

And he looked for stories where others did not, Ms. Polgreen recalled.

On one of my last trips to Liberia, I wrote about how the new president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, was determined to fulfill her campaign promise to restore electrical power to her country’s war-scarred capital. The electrical grid had been destroyed, and the only power came from private generators. She had managed to set up a small power plant to serve a hospital and provide street lights. I ran into Tim at the makeshift ceremony to turn on the new, tiny power grid.

All the other photographers jockeyed for position to get a close-up shot of Mrs. Sirleaf and John Kuofor, the president of Ghana, as they flipped the switch to turn on the new streetlights. But not Tim. He stood apart from the fray, Hasselblad dangling by his side.

The picture, he told me, was the light. That’s the story, he said. Light.

Getty Images Tim Hetherington at rebel headquarters in Tubmanberg, Liberia.

The photographer Michael L. Abramson, whose pictures of nightlife on the South Side of Chicago bring to mind Brassaï’s depiction of Paris, died Monday of kidney cancer. The announcement was made by the Numero Group, a Chicago music company that published his book “Light: On the South Side.”

Lens presented a portfolio of Mr. Abramson’s work — “South Side Blues” — in October 2009.

It’s hard to say for which image Brian Lanker may have been most renowned. Was it the Pulitzer-winning photo of an ebullient Lynda Coburn with her couldn’t-be-more-newly born upon her belly? Or was it the elegant portrait of Septima Poinsette Clark, looking every bit the “queen mother” of the civil rights movement, that graced the cover of his book, “I Dream a World: Portraits of Black Women Who Changed America”?

It’s easy to say what the pictures have in common: sharp intelligence, a great eye, tremendous empathy and a gift for story telling. “It’s all about explaining life,” said Carl Davaz, the deputy managing editor of The Register-Guard in Eugene, Ore., where Mr. Lanker served as a trailblazing director of graphics in the later 1970s.

Both images, and many more, came to mind as news spread through the photojournalism world that Mr. Lanker, 63, died Sunday at home in Eugene, succumbing to a greatly advanced pancreatic cancer that was discovered only 10 days ago. (An obituary by Donald R. Winslow appears on the National Press Photographers Association Web site.)

Mr. Lanker made a name for himself in the early 1970s at The Topeka Capital-Journal, when that paper was a training ground and showcase for some of the ablest talent in photojournalism. “I wasn’t attracted to him — he was attracted to us,” recalled Rich Clarkson, who was the director of photography at The Capital-Journal during that golden era in Kansas. (A portfolio was posted on 20 in the Car, a tribute to Mr. Clarkson organized last year by Mr. Lanker.)

It started with what seemed to be a cold-call job pitch to Mr. Clarkson in 1970. The photo director soon learned that Mr. Lanker had already scouted out the paper thoroughly from Phoenix. He had been reading The Capital-Journal for about a year (not as easy to do then as it is now, children — you had to take out what we used to call a subscription). He’d been speaking with other staff members by phone about working there. And he’d arranged to travel to Topeka so he could stop in and visit Mr. Clarkson in person.

“Even at the time, he had that intensity and intelligence,” Mr. Clarkson said. “I thought, ‘If he does everything like this, he’d be pretty good.’”

Carl Davaz Brian Lanker at home in Eugene, Ore., last July after a gathering of Topeka Capital-Journal alumni in honor of Rich Clarkson.

“He was constantly thinking,” Mr. Clarkson said.

One day, Mr. Lanker proposed a photo essay for the Sunday family section, which Mr. Clarkson was trying to wrest from the realm of society coverage. The idea was that Mr. Lanker would attend a class in the Lamaze method of natural child-bearing, pick one of the couples and follow them through the delivery of their baby.

The key image of his essay, “Moment of Life,” showed freshly born Jacki Coburn, umbilical cord still intact, upon her ecstatic mother. As Mr. Clarkson remembered, it ran the full width of the cover of the family section one Sunday, occupying about one-third of the whole page — “just the way we wanted it.”

When it appeared, however, it was not so much to the taste of the publisher, Oscar S. Stauffer, who made his views warmly clear in a telephone call that morning to the city editor.

Months later, news that “Moment of Life” had won the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for feature photography began to chatter across The Associated Press teletype machines in the Topeka newsroom. The publisher was invited to have a look at the wire story for himself. He professed not to remember the prize-winning image. The city editor reminded him, “It’s the picture you told us we never should have published.”

The Coburns were invited to join the Pulitzer celebration at a steakhouse that night and, over time, Ms. Coburn discovered she had more in common with Mr. Lanker than she had with her own husband. The Coburns divorced and she married Mr. Lanker. She survives him, as do their daughters Jacki and Julie Coburn and their son, Dustin Lanker.

The impact of “Moment in Life,” and of Mr. Lanker’s tenure at The Register-Guard, went far beyond local audiences. James Estrin, a colleague at The Times and on Lens, told me he felt the impact in New York three decades ago.

His photographs of childbirth were the first that many people had seen. At that time, almost no father went into a delivery room. It was extraordinary that a newspaper would publish this and that you could tell this in a photo essay.

Brian told stories very intimately. He influenced a generation of younger photographers, who went off to smaller papers around the country. One didn’t have to travel the world to tell important stories. I went to Jackson, Miss., in 1981, believing that what was important was the opportunity to tell stories in photos.

Mr. Lanker drove from Topeka to Eugene to take over his new job in 1974, following the route of the 19th-century Oregon Trail as closely as he could. He showed up for work with a photo essay already in hand on what the trail now looked like.

“He thought first about the reader,” Mr. Davaz said, “and his magical skills of bringing words-and-pictures journalism together is very much at the heart of the legacy of visual journalism we aspire to practice at The Register-Guard to this day. Many people — far and wide — know about this newspaper because of the heart Brian Lanker brought to it.”

In recent years, as a freelancer, Mr. Lanker took on high-profile advertising clients to bankroll the important work he thought needed to be done, like preserving for posterity the legacy of artists who had been commissioned to paint combat scenes in World War II.

A little over a week ago, not long after Mr. Lanker learned he had inoperable cancer, Mr. Davaz visited him at home. “There were tears in his eyes,” Mr. Davaz recalled. “In a whisper, he said, ‘There’s just so much left to do.’”

Hundreds of friends, family members and colleagues gathered at Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris Thursday to remember Lucas Mebrouk Dolega, a photographer for the European Pressphoto Agency. Mr. Dolega, who was 32, died Jan. 17 from an injury suffered three days earlier while he was covering violent street protests in Tunis. He was hit by a tear gas grenade launched by a police officer at close range.

Olivier Laban-Mattei, a friend and fellow photographer who was with Mr. Dolega at the time, said he will remember him as an honest, energetic and passionate photographer. “He had so many projects,” Mr. Laban-Mattei said. “He tried to witness what he could.”

Mr. Laban-Mattei and Rémi Ochlik have written about their colleague’s last day for Paris Match. (“Tunis: Les Dernières Heures du Photographe Français,” Jan. 21.)

Mr. Laban-Mattei said he and Mr. Dolega had become close when they continually ran into one another on assignment. The night before Mr. Dolega was mortally injured, they had a long chat at the airport over cans of Red Bull while waiting to retrieve their equipment. They talked about their families and their projects. Mr. Dolega loved Latin America and had a number of story ideas he hoped to pursue there.

Corentin Fohlen/European Pressphoto Agency 2008: Lucas Mebrouk Dolega in Congo.

Mr. Dolega was born in Paris. Along with major conflicts, he covered politics, protest and fashion in France and throughout Europe for E.P.A, where he’d begun working in 2006. “He was a firm believer in ‘the closer, the better,’” the agency said in a memorial statement.

Mr. Dolega decided to go to Tunisia after Mr. Ochlik called him to suggest the two catch a flight there. They met Mr. Laban-Mattei in Tunis on Thursday, the 13th. The next day, the three photographers navigated the crowds on Avenue Bourguiba, a central artery, among thousands of angry protesters. At one point later in the afternoon, the police launched tear gas into the crowd.

“We all know what happened next,” Mr. Ochlik wrote in an e-mail.

He met Mr. Dolega about five years ago while covering a student protest. Mr. Ochlik learned that Mr. Dolega was a magazine writer who really wanted to make pictures and told him to contact the European Pressphoto Agency, which was looking for stringers.

Over the years, the two covered Paris together — demonstrations, social crises, politics. “He really loved working in riot situations,” Mr. Ochlik wrote. “Each time a demonstration turned bad in Paris he was there, doing a great job.” In 2008, the two traveled together to Congo, where they covered refugee camps and cholera epidemics. Last year, Mr. Dolega went to Bangkok to shoot the Red Shirt Rebellion.

“Little by little,” Mr. Ochlik wrote, “he was realizing his dream, covering world news.”

Pool photo by Bertrand Guay Jan. 27: Karin Von Sabiensky, Mr. Dolega’s mother, threw a rose into his grave.

Milton Rogovin, an empathetic social documentarian who — like Jacob Riis — put a face on the faceless poor, died Tuesday, a month after celebrating his 101st birthday. Benjamin Genocchio has written the obituary for The New York Times. Mr. Rogovin himself narrated an audio slide show of his pictures, “The Compassionate Eye,” which appeared in April 2009 on Lens, accompanying “Voices Silenced, Faces Preserved,” with text by Randy Kennedy and pictures by Fred R. Conrad, in the Arts & Leisure section.

At a time when middle-class America was fleeing from its decaying inner cities and turning its back fearfully, Mr. Rogovin plunged in, beginning with the Lower West Side of Buffalo. “This ‘fear’ does not figure in Mr. Rogovin’s pictures,” the critic Hilton Kramer wrote in The Times (“Rogovin Photographs of Buffalo Are Shown,” Feb. 21, 1976), when his work was given its first extensive showing in New York, at the International Center of Photography.

He sees something else in the life of this neighborhood — ordinary pleasures and pastimes, relaxation, warmth of feeling and the fundamentals of social connection. He takes his pictures from the inside, so to speak, concentrating on family life, neighborhood business, celebrations, romance, recreation and the particulars of individuals’ existence.

If Mr. Kramer had an objection to Mr. Rogovin’s work, it was that he did not photograph the terrors of life in the disintegrating central city. “This is the limit of his realism — the limit of a sweet, old-fashioned liberalism — but within that limit,” Mr. Kramer wrote, “he has given us something very fine.”

The last time Mr. Rogovin’s name had appeared in the pages of The Times was 19 years earlier (“Inquiry Into Reds at Buffalo Ended,” Oct. 5, 1957), when he was described as the “chief Communist” in the Buffalo area. That was the beginning of his journey into becoming one of the most revered and respected photographers of his generation.

Marty Lederhandler of The Associated Press — “I never want to stop saying that,” he declared on his retirement — was there on June 6, 1944, and on Sept. 11, 2001, and on a remarkable number of occasions in between. (Including Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller’s honeymoon flight to Venezuela.)

He died Thursday in Hackensack, N.J., The A.P. said. He was 92.

Not for him the trajectory of a brilliant early starburst followed by decades of “What have you done lately?” Mr. Lederhandler’s most famous photograph was taken in the last year of a 66-year A.P. career.

Shortly after the World Trade Center was hit in 2001, Mr. Lederhandler left A.P. headquarters at 50 Rockefeller Plaza, crossed the street to 30 Rock, rode the elevator to the rooftop Rainbow Room and took a picture that etched itself into the nation’s nightmares. (The story was recounted by Richard Pyle in “New York’s Longest Run,” in The Digital Journalist, a profile accompanied by a slide show.)

Ed Bailey/Associated Press Marty Lederhandler outside 50 Rockefeller Plaza. Aug. 11, 1998.

Though many of his strongest pictures were close-up views, Mr. Lederhandler managed to capture, from an almost cosmic perspective, that awful interval between impact and collapse, when the rest of New York City looked magnificently serene on a gorgeous September morning. The plume of smoke from the burning towers almost seemed to wreathe the Empire State Building in the foreground, which would — in a matter of minutes — become the tallest building standing. A viewer aches to somehow turn back the clock.

Another one of Mr. Lederhandler’s best known pictures, taken on D-Day, was never seen by American readers. As the A.P. reported:

Drafted into the Army in 1940, he became an officer and on June 6, 1944, led his Signal Corps camera team ashore with the 4th Infantry Division at Utah Beach, toting two carrier pigeons along with his camera gear.

But when he attached film canisters for the pigeons to return across the Channel to England, the second one, evidently confused, flew inland instead.

A month later, U.S. troops capturing Cherbourg found a German army newspaper left by fleeing Germans with one of the photos on Page 1, duly credited to ”U.S.A. reporter, Lt. Lederhandler.”

The photographs are still shocking.

In one, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. — America’s foremost advocate of nonviolent social change — is manhandled like a common thug in a Montgomery, Ala., police station. In another, civil rights demonstrators are pummeled by high-pressure water houses turned on them by the Birmingham, Ala., fire department. In the third, the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan in North Carolina is driving to a rally with his Klan robe hanging over the back seat as if it were a suit jacket.

They are all by Charles Moore, who worked hard to be in the wrong place at the right time as the civil-rights battle unfolded in the South in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Word of his death last week at the age of 79 spread widely Monday among photojournalists. “His photographs have been credited by many for changing the mood of the nation regarding civil rights and helping to speed up passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” Donald Winslow wrote in an obituary for the National Press Photographers Association. “Moore’s photograph of King’s arrest moved on The Associated Press wire and was picked up by Life magazine, transforming what had been a regional story into a national debate,” Mr. Winslow added.

Bill Eppridge, a Life magazine alumnus, wrote what amounted to an elegiac poem on Sunday:

So sad.
Many of us knew him very well.
A true Southern Gentleman.
A fine Journalist.
Thoughtful, incisive, compassionate,
An Artist.

His photographs were collected in “Powerful Days: The Civil Rights Photography of Charles Moore.” He was represented by Black Star.

Though his record of that tumultuous era is well-known, it may surprise some of his admirers to learn how close that archive was to having been lost. John Trotter shared the story on Monday.

“I remember photographing him when he was living up in Columbia, Calif., in the early ’90s and he pointed to a framed front page of The Modesto Bee on the wall,” Mr. Trotter said. “On it was a very large photograph of a helicopter dropping fire retardant on a hillside. On top of the hill was his house. And he told me that he’d loaded all the civil rights film and prints he could into a car and was ready to leave before the firefighters stopped the fire.”

Mr. Trotter added: “He was a brave photographer, but such an unassuming gentleman of the old school. And he made some of the incredible events he saw into images that will be iconic as long as this nation exists.”

Dennis Stock, whose photographs may have done almost as much to create James Dean’s public persona as the actor’s own performances, died Monday in Florida. He was 81.

Rene Burri/Magnum Photos Dennis Stock

The announcement was made Wednesday in New York by the Magnum Photos co-operative, where Mr. Stock was a member and a mainstay for six decades. Yes. Six decades.

“Dennis Stock seems impeccably contemporary in his perceptions, whether they be of splendid nature or ‘peccable’ humanity,” the critic and essayist Ralph Pomeroy wrote in “Contemporary Photographers” (1982). “He has managed to evoke jazz without the assistance of sound — its places, its atmosphere, its times, its makers.”

Stock’s choice of subject, his attitude of observance, the ‘color’ of his interests, reveal him as truly of his time, not in the sense of being ‘with it,’ which has to do with the ephemeral and fashion, but in the sense of attunement to the temper of American modern experience.

As a 23-year-old, Mr. Stock came to national attention in 1951 when he won the first prize in the story division of Life magazine’s young photographers’ contest for his essay on the arrival in New York of displaced persons from Europe who had been homeless since the end of World War II.

In “Get the Picture: A Personal History of Journalism” (1998), John G. Morris recalled that Gjon Mili, for whom Mr. Stock was then working, believed at that moment that the young man was ready to go out on his own. Robert Capa agreed and brought him aboard Magnum. Mr. Morris continued:

Dennis is probably best known today for his 1955 essay on James Dean — and specifically for a single image of Dean, in Times Square, walking the ‘Street of Broken Dreams,’ his shoulders hunched, his head pulled low inside an overcoat. The essay appeared in Life and did much to help make the short-lived actor a cult figure.

Mr. Stock avidly kept track of new developments in photography and regularly submitted comments to the Lens blog — on the work of Christopher Anderson, John Trotter, Bill Eppridge, Emilio Morenatti and the depiction of suffering in art.

“The goal for the photographer is be be visually articulate,” Mr. Stock wrote. “If the subject is in a suffering circumstance, it is all the more preferable to apply craft to the utmost. Call it art or not, we photographers should always try to pass on our observations with the utmost clarity.”

Mark Lubell, Magnum’s New York bureau chief, said he had been in discussions with Mr. Stock as recently as two weeks ago about future distribution plans. “Dennis’s dedication to his craft and his desire to ensure Magnum’s future have been extremely important to the organization,” he said.

Evelyn Hofer, 87, was a flawless technician and a much sought-after teacher, who searched for an “inside value, some interior respect” in the people she photographed. She favored carefully composed scenes with a still, timeless aura, William Grimes notes, in reporting her death on Nov. 2.

Smooth, silky, smoky and gentle; as formal as you might expect from the painter he once wanted to be, Roy DeCarava’s photographs speak in a language far softer than we’re accustomed to now. They are no less powerful for their subtlety. They are meant to repay close study and they do.

Mr. DeCarava’s death is reported by Randy Kennedy on Arts Beat.

“He was looking at everyday life in Harlem from the inside, not as a sociological or political vehicle,” Peter Galassi, the chief curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, told Mr. Kennedy. “No photographer black or white before him had really shown ordinary domestic life so perceptively and tenderly, so persuasively.”

Irving Penn, a modern master and one of the most celebrated photographers of the 20th century, died on Wednesday morning. He was 92.

Horst/Staley-Wise Gallery Irving Penn, New York, 1951.

Renowned for his fashion photos and studio portraits, he captured the famous of his time including Pablo Picasso, Georgia O’Keeffe and Truman Capote. He is also recognized for his portfolio of fleshy abstractions of the human nude and still lifes.

Mr. Penn’s career was jump-started via his association with Vogue magazine, beginning in 1943, and his commercial work gained him attention and later entrance into the art world.

More of his life and work can be seen in an obituary by Andy Grundberg in Thursday’s New York Times.

Janet SchwartzMarcey Jacobson signing a large digital print in June.

Though her work lovingly depicts a world and time anchored deeply in the past, Marcey Jacobson was rooted in the present. As recently as two months ago, at the age of 97, she was helping to prepare an exhibition of more than 100 images that she had taken from the 1960s to the 1980s in her adopted home of San Cristóbal de las Casas, in the Chiapas highlands of southern Mexico. She died July 26, leaving behind “an incredible historical and ethnographic document of a time long gone by in this blessed corner of the earth,” said Janet Schwartz, her friend and executor. That legacy — some 14,000 negatives — is to be housed at the Na Bolom Cultural Association in San Cristóbal. Ms. Schwartz shared what few photos have been scanned with the Lens blog.

Born in the Bronx, Ms. Jacobson discovered San Cristóbal in 1956 and never looked back. She lived there with her partner, Janet Marren, a painter.

“She took up photography with a borrowed Rolleiflex camera,” Bruce Weber of The Times wrote in an obituary published Tuesday. “Patiently exploring the colorful city, the central marketplace for the Mayan-speaking Indian villages of the region, she won the trust of the often camera-shy locals and taught herself the craft of making black-and-white pictures from what she saw in its cobblestone streets and muddy byways, in its dramatic landscapes and weather events, and perhaps most of all, in the faces of the inhabitants. Her portraits were haunting.”

Next month, on what would have been Ms. Jacobson’s 98th birthday, her ashes are to be scattered around a tree at her home in San Cristóbal, joining those of Ms. Marren, who died in 1998.

Marcey Jacobson Janet Marren, left, and Marcey Jacobson — “compañeras.”