Helen Marcus, a late-blooming 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 death was confirmed by her sister, Irene Feuerstein.

Ms. Marcus’s photographs were disseminated in a wide variety of venues. Some were seen in annual corporate reports, and one was the model for an etching on a Swedish postage stamp honoring the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison. She also became a champion of her fellow professionals.

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.

Ms. 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.

Responding to a profile in The New York Times crediting George Lois, the Madison Avenue art director, with designing striking covers for Esquire magazine, Ms. Marcus complained, in a letter to the editor in 2008, that the article did not adequately acknowledge Carl Fischer, the photographer whose images loomed large in many of those designs.

“It is akin to publishing pictures of the Sistine Chapel and mentioning the pope who paid for them,” she wrote, “but not the painter.”