Martin Bell's groundbreaking 1984 Oscar-nominated documentary Streetwise introduced us to a group of homeless and troubled youths who eked out a living on the streets of Seattle as pimps, prostitutes, panhandlers and small-time drug dealers. Of the memorable kids in Streetwise, none was more charismatic than the charming, confident thirteen-year-old protagonist ‘Tiny’. Tiny (Erin Blackwell, who got her street name because of her stature) dreamed of life on a horse farm, of diamonds and furs, and of having ten children.
Mary Ellen Mark's work on this project was first published in Life magazine in 1983 and later in the book Streetwise in 1988. After this first encounter with Tiny over thirty years ago, Mark and Bell continued to photograph and film Tiny regularly, creating one of their most significant and long-term projects. In 2015, Mark's book Tiny: Streetwise Revisited was published by Aperture, to which she was a major contributor. Mary Ellen Mark died after completing her work on this collection. It contains the most meaningful images from her earlier book Streetwise and takes us through Tiny's life, from a thirteen-year-old to a middle-aged mother of ten.
