On her first night in Seattle on assignment for Life magazine, the photographer Mary Ellen Mark was in the parking lot of a club called the Monastery when a taxicab pulled up. Out stepped Erin “Tiny” Blackwell, a 13-year-old girl with a devastating stare. Mark had already met several other street kids, many of whom would be included in the photo essay “Streets of the Lost,” created in collaboration with the journalist Cheryl McCall and published in July 1983. But Tiny, a teenage prostitute, was mesmerizing. Mark called her husband, the filmmaker Martin Bell, telling him to come out and shoot a film.The result was “Streetwise” (1984), which Mark, McCall, and Bell began making a month after the photo essay was published. “When we first got together, we wanted to find a project that we could work on together,” Bell recalled recently in the New York City studio he shared with his wife until she passed away, in May 2015. This was the perfect opportunity. “Mary Ellen had a great sense of story, and she had already shot a lot of photographs [of the kids]. Because she had been there already and knew the kids, they let me in on the street and introduced me to people. But then she would find stuff that was going on and report back. It was a real cooperation.”“Streetwise” will be shown June 25 — along with “Tiny: The Life of Erin Blackwell,” a sequel that picks up with the subject 30 years later — at the Brooklyn Academy of Music as part of BAMcinemaFest. The screening coincides with the exhibition “Tiny: Streetwise Revisited,” at the Aperture Gallery in New York City through June 30, which, together with its accompanying publication, provides insight into Mark and Bell’s dedication to documenting Blackwell. “The photographs are extraordinary things,” Bell said. When I asked him why audiences are so invested in their telling of Blackwell’s life story, he answered quickly, “I think it’s the intimacy and longevity of it. I know that at one moment in the gallery, I was standing at the corner, and on my left was Tiny at 14 years old, and to my right there she was at 47. It was amazing.”Mark’s photographs of Blackwell are some of her best known and continue to find new admirers. This is in part because of their formal beauty, the way she was able to capture a staggering amount of emotion in a single image. “Mary Ellen had an extraordinary gift. She was able to tell a story in one frame,” Bell said. “It’s easier to make films because you have so many things to distract an audience with. In a still frame, that’s it. There’s no cut.”That is not to say that making “Streetwise” was simple. Even though Mark had spent time with the children and her presence helped them become comfortable with Bell, he still had to prove that he was not going to take advantage of them. He recalled an incident that took place early in the process, at a recreation center where many of the kids would go for food or just to hang. Bell had been shooting a girl for 10 minutes when she suddenly turned around and told him she did not want to be filmed. “So I opened the magazine of the camera and broke off the film and gave it to her,” Bell said. “Everybody saw me do that, and in a sense, it helped. People understood I was not going to steal stuff from them.”“Streetwise” initially screened in 1985 at New Directors/New Films at the Museum of Modern Art and was nominated that year for an Academy Award for Best Documentary. The book of the same name, containing excerpts from the film as captions to Mark’s photographs, developed a cult following along with the movie. Fans have kept tabs on the kids depicted and have created groups on the internet to talk about their stories. Although the film has not been commercially available for many years, it has remained in people’s hearts and minds. (Bell said a wider release for “Streetwise” is in the works but did not go into specifics.)For Mark and Bell, the project never ended. “Mary Ellen kept going back to take more photographs,” Bell said. “On a few occasions, I would go and make a short film. Just so we were working together.” It wasn’t that they were planning a sequel or expansion. “It was like a home movie,” Bell explained.But a few years ago when Aperture came to Mark with plans to put all her photographs of Tiny into a book and, at the same time, asked if Bell would make a short film to accompany its release. “Like many things Mary Ellen and I did, it got out of hand,” he said with a laugh. “It became a bigger thing.”The result was “Tiny: The Life of Erin Blackwell.” A more intimate portrait than its predecessor, it moves beyond the main character to encompass her growing family. Blackwell now has 10 children, some of whom are adults and have their own problems with drugs and the law. The camera swivels around their small home, tracking their pivoting lives with a huge amount of empathy. Like “Streetwise” before it, “Tiny” grew out of a long period of documentation in a variety of mediums and was made possible by the trust developed between creator and subject. One of the most remarkable things about both films is the way the children are not just allowed but are willing, even eager at times, to open up in front of the camera.“Erin never had a problem,” Bell said. “That was something that Mary Ellen knew right from the beginning when she was photographing her.” Mark and Bell became like those relatives you have who are always standing in the corner, snapping pictures, and you ignore. They would walk into Blackwell’s house, take their cameras out, and start shooting. There was nothing unusual in the situation. Images were a central part of the relationship among the three, of their shared history.This is never more evident than in the opening sequence of “Tiny,” featuring Mark and Blackwell, both much older than when they met each on that night in the parking lot, scanning images of their past lives on an iPad. Each picture brings up different emotions: confusion, laughter, puzzlement, sadness. “Mary Ellen was ill,” Bell said of that section of the film, which ends up as its foundation. “We knew there was a limited amount of time she would have. I had shot everything else, and then, I thought, ‘My God, the thing here now would be to have a story that is essentially the core, the truth of this: What this has been, from 1983 through the end, was a conversation that was continuous.’ We did that one month before Mary Ellen died.”For Bell, the larger project has always been about bringing into the open the kind of existence Blackwell is forced into. “The story of Tiny’s life, right on the edge of our society, is a very unseen world in an intimate way,” he said. “People think of it more as a statistical problem. This is everyday life, and this is how it works. There’s nothing dramatic here. This is what it looks like when you’re in that position.”Through constant documentation and dialogue, dedication and commitment to an unfiltered view of reality, the continuous conversation among the three has survived. But with Mark gone, will the conversation continue?Bell takes a second to reply. “The story is not over, that’s for sure.”
↧