Mary Ellen Mark (born March 20, 1940) is an American photographer known for her photojournalism, portraiture, and advertising photography. Her photography has addressed such social issues as homelessness, loneliness, drug addiction, and prostitution. She works primarily in black and white. She has described her approach to her subjects: "I’ve always felt that children and teenagers are not "children," they’re small people. I look at them as little people and I either like them or I don’t like them. I also have an obsession with mental illness. And strange people who are outside the borders of society." Mark has also said, "I’d rather pull up things from another culture that are universal, that we can all relate to….There are prostitutes all over the world. I try to show their way of life…"
Streetwise is a 1984 documentary film by director Martin Bell. It followed in the wake of a July 1983 Life magazine article, "Streets of the Lost", by writer Cheryl McCall and photographer Mary Ellen Mark, Bell's wife.
According to Mark's accompanying 1988 book, eponymously titled Streetwise, McCall and Mark traveled to Seattle 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 children during the writing of the article, Mark convinced Bell that the children were worthy of his making a documentary based on their lives. McCall and Mark were also instrumental in making the film. Streetwise follows the lives of several homeless teenagers, although it focuses most on 14-year-old Erin Blackwell, a child 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".
Mark photographed many of the children throughout the filming of Streetwise and published a book of the same name in 1988. The photographs are captioned with quotations from the film. The transcript of Bell's film appears at the end of the book, with only minor differences.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Ellen_Mark (Date Accessed 22/03/15)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetwise_(1984_film) (Date Accessed 22/03/15)
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