My first job was as a page at a local library. I would go there after school, shelve books for a couple of hours, and then head home. I ended up working there all through high school. Because one of my jobs was to return books to their rightful shelves, I handled many many books that were far too mature for me, and were way beyond my years. One of them was Mary Ellen Mark’s Streetwise
The photo above, of the little girl with the veiled hat, was on the cover, and the image didn’t just strike me, it stopped me dead in my tracks. I was 12 years old. I didn’t know what I was sensing, I didn’t know what that photo meant. She looked like she was around my age, she could be a classmate, but there was something in her face that seemed entirely … off the map of my own experience, let’s just say that. I didn’t understand. So before I put the book back in its rightful place, I looked through its pages. And the bottom dropped out of my stomach. I fell into a trance. It was horrible what I was seeing, but it was beautiful too. The photographs of those kids were eloquent and stark, their emotions on the outside of their skin, their experience laid bare for the camera.
There was text and quotes accompanying the photographs. I read it all (in small spurts during my various shifts at the library.) I would go and find the book on the shelf in a slow moment, and read a little bit more. I was a sheltered child and I knew somehow that the book was meant for adults, but I had to keep looking. I got to know all of the kids. Sleeping on dirty mattresses in empty warehouses. Bumming cigarettes from passersby. And Tiny, who really became the “star” of the book (she was the girl on the cover), the child-prostitute. Tiny haunted me. I stared and stared and stared at all of the photographs of her. I wanted to know what it felt like to be her. I felt like I got a glimpse into that just by looking at her face. I didn’t realize it then but I was in the presence of Mary Ellen Mark’s considerable genius. Or maybe I did realize it. Maybe I did think to myself, “I have never seen photographs like this!”
I got to know that book by heart. I worked at the library for 5 years, so I had my daily pit-stops in the shelves. That’s how I read the entirety of Carroll Baker’s autobiography, in 5 minute spurts. A life-changer. In 1984 came the Streetwise documentary but I was still in high school and not really clicked into the art-house scene. I wasn’t paying attention. But when I finally put it together, I saw the documentary and I saw those photographs – the ones I had memorized – come to life. All of those faces I had come to know so well, I got to see them moving, and walking and talking.
There are many other photographs from Mary Ellen Mark that are famous.
The one of Marlon Brando with the bug. But it is Tiny et al that I am thinking about now, because without Mary Ellen Mark I would never have known of their existence. I was not alone in being haunted by Tiny. Mary Ellen Mark periodically would go back to check on her, see how she was doing (Tiny, Streetwise Revisited
The fact that Mary Ellen Mark got “access” to these street kids to such an intimate degree that they opened themselves up to the camera as rawly as they did, tells me (and told me) everything I need to know about who Mary Ellen Mark was, not just as a photographer, but as a human being.
Rest in peace.
Jeez that is some picture. I think I ‘m about the same age as you and hence the girl in the photo. I could see how it would have struck you as a twelve year old and I think I would have had a similar reaction… A little pinprick into our safe little 12 year old bubble worlds.
By the way thank god for libraries right? I’m in the habit of taking my special needs son to the local library on lazy Saturday afternoons and he spends easily an hour just raptly browsing. While he does that I usually grab a biography and a comfortable chair. I picked up an autobiography by Phil Lesh, the bassist for the Grateful Dead and a known connosoir of avant garde music.
In the book he tells how he became introduced to works of the modern composers. Turns out when he was a Freshman in college he got a job working at the college library. His main job was to inspect and by inspect I mean listen to the vinyl LP’s that had been borrowed to make sure they were returned in good shape. And that’s where he was introduced to all of that different music.
Dg – I love the story about you and your son at the library! So so true. One of the things I really miss these days is the phenomenon of random browsing. I mean, I guess I could browse on Amazon – but it doesn’t have the same pleasure as strolling through the shelves. Not looking for anything in particular, stopping to pull this or that book out ….
I still go to bookstores and browse – just not as much as I used to.
And my job at the library was so great – I discovered so many books I NEVER would have discovered otherwise, because I had to re-shelve books by/for adults. Streetwise had a glamour to it – it was a beautiful book – the photographs were huge and compelling – but since it was clearly about my peers – kids my own age – some a little older – it was this whole other universe presented to me. It was a lot to take, but it was good for my soul, that’s for sure. A loss of innocence, but that’s okay. That’s how it should be – wake up to how it is for other people.
If you get a chance, you should check out the documentary – it looks like the whole thing is on Youtube. Tiny is the center of it, and it’s obvious why – not just because of her “plight” but because of her uncanny openness to the camera. She was a “star” in that way. A little girl, but with this hardened woman-of-the-world in her eyes. She was both.
Her mother tells the camera that her daughter working as a prostitute is “just a phase she’s going through.”
Ma’am, your daughter is 13 years old.
I’d seen some of the photographs from this series floating around but didn’t have much context for where they were from; such strange, sad endings for so many of those kids. One of them ended up being a victim of the Green River killer. And Mary Ellen Mark invited Tiny to come live with her and her husband but she never would say yes.
This project would almost be a cliche now but not in the 80’s. It’s a forerunner to a certain kind of photojournalism that doesn’t seem to be very sought after these days. In one interview Mary Ellen Mark was saying that working with magazines were like ‘grants’ to her, that they were willing to pay money for the sort of thing she was interested in. And that doesn’t exist now.
Desirae –
// One of them ended up being a victim of the Green River killer. //
Ugh. I didn’t know that. That’s terrible.
And yes I had read that comment from Mary Ellen Mark about “grants” – we just don’t have magazines the way we used to. Or an interest in a long-form project like this one. I mean, those gigs still are out there – but it’s just a different world.
I love that Mary Ellen Mark used the same cameras for the entirety of her career. She was not a technology-nut, she found the camera she liked in the 60s, 70s, and stayed with it.