How does Mary Ellen Mark make such compelling images of people? I mean I live in an area of poor people in Indonesia, but I find it extremely hard to get such images from people since they always seem happy to meet a foreigners or think what I am doing is strange. In my traveling I always find it hard to take the humanitarian images that Mary Ellen Mark or Sebastiao Salgado seem to find without a lot of trouble. I have even lived around the people I would love to photograph in my own way, but happy kids in a poor country never seem to invoke the kind of ideas that people want to buy from a far away land.

What is the secret?