Helen Marcus, a photographer whose evocative black-and-white portraits of literary figures and film and television personalities graced book jackets and magazine covers for decades, died on Oct. 1 at her home in Manhattan. She was 97.

Her fame as a photographer, and her leadership role as a defender of her profession on issues of copyright and credit were all the more notable because the field at the time was so overwhelmingly dominated by men.

Helen Marcus founded the New York chapter of the American Society of Magazine Photographers (later the American Society of Media Photographers) in 1982 and served as its national president from 1985 to 1990. From 1998 to 2007, she was president of the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund, an organization named for the celebrated photojournalist that was established in 1979 to help independent photographers complete their projects.

Her work appeared in Time, Forbes, Gourmet and other magazines, and in The New York Times. Her photographs are included in the permanent collections of the National Portrait Gallery and the International Center of Photography. Her 1977 photograph of Toni Morrison inspired an etching that appeared on a Swedish postage stamp. “It’s probably the most reproduced photograph I ever made,” she said in an interview with New Letters magazine in 2007.