Muristek
The big picture: Mary Ellen Mark captures teens on the streets of Seattle
The documentary photographer took a striking series of pictures of children living in the American city in the 1980s
The ghetto blasters date this picture to the early 1980s, that noisy few years when urban streets thudded with mixtape basslines from almost portable machines like these, usually carried on the shoulder. Mary Ellen Mark took the picture of the two boys, in Seattle, on assignment for Life magazine. The story was about the then relatively new phenomenon of large numbers of teenage children living on America’s streets. Seattle was chosen because it had just been voted the nation’s “most liveable city”.
Mark, who died in 2015, thought of herself as a documentary photographer rather than a photojournalist. The distinction, she believed, was that she was not shooting news; her skill was “to be able to pull things from reality, to see what’s strange and real”. Her Seattle story focused on a group of teenagers, some as young as 13, who had run away from home and were surviving selling drugs or by selling themselves for sex. The lives she witnessed were so disturbing that she stayed involved with them in different ways. She tried to adopt one 13-year-old girl, Tiny, a sex worker, to remove her from the place; when that did not succeed, Mark worked with her husband, film-maker Martin Bell, to make a documentary that drew attention to these children’s lives. Streetwise was nominated for an Oscar in 1984. She stayed in touch with Tiny and the other kids throughout her life.
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