Published in 1988 (first published 1985)
77 pages
Mary Ellen Mark, born 1940, has achieved worldwide visibility through her numerous books, exhibitions and editorial magazine work. She is a contributing photographer to The New Yorker and has published photo-essays and portraits in such publications as Life, New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, and Vanity Fair. For over four decades, she has travelled extensively to make pictures that reflect a high degree of humanism. Today, she is recognized as one of our most respected and influential photographers. Her images of our world’s diverse cultures have become landmarks in the field of documentary photography. Her portrayals of Mother Teresa, Indian circuses, and brothels in Bombay were the product of many years of work in India. A photo essay on runaway children in Seattle became the basis of the academy award nominated film Streetwise, directed and photographed by her husband, Martin Bell.
Mary Ellen Mark put her hands on photography in the 1960s, depicting streets scenes in her native Philadelphia as well as anti-Vietnam and women’s rights demonstrations in New York. Quite promptly, when working for Look magazine, the American photographer chose to chronicle the existences of the desperate, the marginals, the homeless, the wounded of life such as Indian street prostitutes, psychiatric patients, juvenile heroine addicts: “I care about people and that’s why I became a photographer.”
What is this book about?
In the July 1983 issue of LIFE magazine, writer Cheryl McCall and photographer Mary Ellen Mark published “Streets of the Lost,” an in-depth article and photo essay on Seattle street kids. In the piece, McCall and Mark tell the story of a group of homeless and runaway teens—Tina, a 13-year-old prostitute with dreams of diamonds and furs; Rat and Mike, 16-year-olds who eat from dumpsters; and Dewayne, a 16-year-old boy who hanged himself in a juvenile facility when faced with the prospect of returning to the streets. It’s uneasy subject matter, and a staggering portrait of what life without a stable home can look like. Despite the darkness of her subjects, Mary Ellen Mark always managed to propose humanistic images, freed from obscenity and disapproval. She also captured the glamour of society as a recognized celebrity portraitist and an on-set photographer for Federico Fellini or Francis Ford Coppola. The photographer succeeded in linking the illustrious with the miserable in the same melancholic yet gentle manner: “I take sad photographs. But look at the tenderness.”
According to this book, titled Streetwise, same as the documentary that accompanied it, McCall and Mark traveled to Seattle, Washington specifically to reveal that even in a town that billed itself as America’s most livable city, there still existed rampant homelessness and desperation. After making connections with several homeless youth during the writing of the article, Mark convinced Bell that the youth were worthy of his making a documentary based on their lives. McCall and Mark were also instrumental in making the film, which was funded by singer Willie Nelson. Streetwise follows the lives of several homeless teenagers, although it focuses most on 14-year-old Erin Blackwell, a young prostitute who goes by the name of Tiny. Much of the time, Tiny stays at the home of her alcoholic mother, Pat, who seems unfazed by her daughter’s prostitution, calling it a “phase”.
This book is really a companion to the film documentary of the same name. The bulk of the photos are stills from the film. There is a nice-if not very short update (as of 1988) of how the core kids they followed where doing. There is also a follow-up documentary, named Streetwise: Tiny Revisited, was released in 2016.
