How a 14-year-old prostitute from Seattle became a photographer's muse for life
Photographer Mary Ellen Mark found her muse, a 14-year—old prostitute named Tiny, on the streets of Seattle. It inspired her to take a series of photos about life at the bottom.
The photographer Mary Ellen Mark, who has already passed away, told about her first meeting with Tiny in an interview with Leica News. She came to Seattle in 1983 on assignment from Life magazine to film the lives of homeless and runaway teenagers. Mark was waiting at the entrance to the club, which was called the Monastery ("Monastery"), where street children often hung out.
Tiny, whose real name is Erin Blackwell, was 14 when she met Mark, and she worked in the sex industry to support her growing drug addiction. In the circle of street children in which she moved, everyone had nicknames. There was Rat, Lulu, Smurf, Munchkin and there was Tiny, blessed with her nickname because, as she said, "I was very small."
Mark turned directly to Tiny, hoping to take pictures of her. Tiny was afraid that Mark was from the police, screamed and ran away. But Mark followed Tiny, visited her at her mother's house.
So began a relationship that would last until Mark's death in 2015. A photo exhibition entitled "Tiny: Memories of a Sophisticated Street" (Tiny: Streetwise Revisited), which takes place in New York, tells about Tiny's life from the time when she served customers on the streets of Seattle, to the moment when she became a middle-aged woman with ten children.
In her photographs, Mark captured Tiny with unwavering honesty and compassion. Tiny as the subject of the shooting did not hide anything.
The black-and-white pictures show a young woman, at the same time tough and vulnerable, sophisticated and naive, suffering and optimistic.
Mark's photographic essay formed the basis of a documentary film, which is also called "Streetwise". It tells about the life of this attractive, fallen youth. The director of this film is the photographer's husband Martin Bell, and the music was written by Tom Waits. The documentary was nominated for an Oscar.
Blurred fantasies are felt in the "Halloween" picture, in which Tiny is dressed in a black veil and stylish black gloves. It seems as if she stepped off the pages of a fashion magazine. Mark said Tiny was dressed like a "Parisian prostitute."
Mark was born on March 20, 1940 in Philadelphia. She graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1962 with a degree in painting and fine arts and two years later received a master's degree in photojournalism. After graduating from university, Mark traveled to Turkey to Fulbright Summer School, where she shot footage that was later included in her first album, Passport. It was then that she took the photo, which, according to her, determined her fate as a photographer. In the picture there was a young girl named Emine, who posed on the streets of Trabzon in a dress with ruffles and with a white bow on her head.
There is something disarming in her behavior, a sensual adult in the body of a child who challenges the viewer to look at her further.
Inspired by photographer Diane Arbus, Mark reached out to those who live on the edge, exploring embodiments of beauty that are completely different from those that can be found on magazine covers or on the walls of museums.
Even when the "Tempted by the Street" project came to an end, Mark and Tiny continued to communicate. For 32 years, Mark continued to shoot Tiny when she had children, when she fell in love, when she stopped using drugs. At some point, Mark and her husband Bell offered Tiny to take her to New York with the condition that she would go to school, but she refused, saying that school was not for her.
There are no diamonds or yachts in Tiny's life right now. But at Tiny has life, comfort and security, things she has never taken for granted. When Mark interviewed Tiny in 2005, she said:
Mark died in 2015, leaving behind a vivid portrait of human life, full of pain, struggle, freedom and the desire to survive. Through Mark's lens, viewers come face to face with the brutal reality of poverty, which affects Tiny's children in the same way that she left her mark on her own destiny.
We see the impact of poverty, drug use and street life, the scars they leave on her flesh and in her eyes. And we see the vitality of the spirit, which makes us continue to live, dream about horses and fight to be noticed.