Tiny: Streetwise Revisited
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Publisher
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ISBN
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Publication Year2015
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Edition1st Edition
Description
Mary Ellen Mark’s *Tiny: Streetwise Revisited* returns to a photographic relationship that began among homeless and troubled young people surviving on the streets of Seattle. Mark’s 1988 book *Streetwise* introduced Tiny—Erin Blackwell—as a thirteen-year-old involved in prostitution, imagining a future of horses, jewels, and children. Rather than leaving that encounter fixed in adolescence, Mark continued to photograph her for roughly three decades.
The resulting work follows Tiny into middle age and motherhood. At forty-three, she had ten children, and the distance between her early aspirations and adult circumstances gives the book its emotional and social complexity. Poverty, class, race, and addiction are not treated as abstract subjects; they emerge through the accumulated particulars of one life and the family formed around it. Mark’s sustained attention also resists the compressed time frame of conventional reportage, allowing change, repetition, endurance, and consequence to become visible.
Published by Aperture Foundation in 2015, this expanded monograph brings together photographs from the earlier *Streetwise* project and a substantial body of intimate work on Tiny, much of it previously unpublished. Texts and captions drawn from conversations among Tiny, Mark, and filmmaker Martin Bell—Mark’s husband and the director of *Streetwise*—place spoken recollection alongside the photographs. That interplay gives the book a dialogic character and makes the long relationship between photographer and subject part of the work’s meaning.
For a serious photobook collection, the volume matters as an example of documentary photography revised across time. Its significance lies not only in individual images but in the cumulative form: an early portrayal is reconsidered through decades of continued contact, while the original subject is allowed to age beyond the moment in which the public first encountered her. Across 176 pages, *Tiny: Streetwise Revisited* asks what sustained observation can reveal—and what responsibilities accompany a photographer’s decision to keep looking.
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