Kids These Days

“The only happy families in this world are written in fictional books,” says Tiny to the photographer Mary Ellen Mark in Tiny: The Life of Erin Blackwell (2016). The film, directed by Mark’s husband and collaborator, Martin Bell, picks up where their previous film, Streetwise (1984), left off. It follows the life of Tiny, who was 14 and working as a prostitute in Seattle when Mark first met her, in 1983. Mark’s decades-spanning catalogue is as diverse as they come, but what unifies her photographs is an unwillingness to shy away from life’s underbelly. Sadness, pain, unfairness: the late photographer confronted all of it with her lens, producing prescient Tolstoys in Tiny and the countless others she immortalized. Mark’s images of children—included in a comprehensive upcoming volume conceived and edited by Bell—prove that as dark as the photographs are, they also contain traces of hope and defiance. Even Mark’s youngest subjects are well acquainted with life’s cruelties, but they forge on. —Julia Vitale