Streetwise/Tiny: The Life of Erin Blackwell: Qualities of Life

The power of Streetwise, and one of the main reasons it still resonates today, lies in how it conveys these violent trade-offs and contradictions without a hint of didacticism or moral panic. Owing to the relationships first established by Mark and McCall in their work for Life, and the singular subtlety and skill of Bell’s camera work, the film proceeds through an accumulation of small, everyday details, communicating through the words of its subjects and the emotions on their faces. “Photography’s very weird because it has to be extremely subtle,” Mark once reflected, “and yet it has to be nonsubtle at the same time.” Streetwise is replete with episodes that tread this line, quick and quiet moments that somehow speak loudly, such as a late encounter between Patrice and his mother. Patrice has spent the bulk of the film talking up his street-smart ways, from his acumen as a pimp to his hundred-dollar drug scores. In his mother’s arms, however, he is a kid again. As she lovingly admonishes him for the grief he has caused her, Bell’s camera lingers on a Band-Aid adorning Patrice’s right hand; the shot then proceeds to his face, suddenly and strikingly bashful. His mother knows he will not come home, but she hesitates to give him money that she has struggled to earn. Through Bell’s camera, we see Patrice still caught in adolescence, we perceive how hard his mother must work, and we understand how he could prefer the self-confidence and easy money he finds on the streets.

The art of the film was no accident. “Some have thought Streetwise was too beautifully filmed to be a documentary,” wrote Keith Desmond, the film’s sound recordist, in a 2004 reflection. “For the UK television audience, the quality of the images in Streetwise was standard documentary TV in the early eighties.” Indeed, Desmond and Bell, both British, had worked for a decade and a half together in their home country’s documentary field. Before coming to Seattle, Mark was already highly accomplished, and well-traveled; her first published volume of work, from 1974, contains photos of everyday people from across the planet and is titled simply Passport. Behind the composition of her candid shots was a well-honed ability to forge relationships outside the frame. (“I never met anyone else who could connect with people better than Mary Ellen, no matter who they were or where they came from,” Bell has reflected.) Bell and Mark also had experience working on film sets—they themselves had met working on the set of Miloš Forman’s Ragtime—and their own love of international cinema undoubtedly contributed to the film’s aesthetic as well. Bell has cited Federico Fellini as a particular influence, and it’s not hard to see the likeness of Cabiria in Streetwise’s many close-ups of Tiny, including its final moment, in which the camera follows her, dressed up, into the darkness of an underpass.

Of course, Martin Bell and Mary Ellen Mark’s work with Tiny, whose real name is Erin Blackwell, did not end with that closing shot. The filmmakers kept in touch with their subject over the course of thirty years, documenting their periodic visits, which culminated in Tiny: The Life of Erin Blackwell. In the time since Streetwise, Seattle’s “livability” quotient for its middle classes had remained intact, but after the 1986 IPO of its suburban software company, Microsoft—an event that birthed thousands of millionaires (and a few billionaires)—the city’s inequality only intensified. One count of Seattle’s homeless population in 2019 exceeded eleven thousand; the only cities with more homeless people in the United States that year were New York and Los Angeles. Fortunately, Blackwell today is not among them, though she is among the thousands of former Seattle residents displaced by the high cost of living to the suburbs south of the city. 

Much of Tiny was filmed following Mark’s diagnosis with a terminal blood disease, and it was completed by Bell following her death in 2015. Formally dedicated to Mark, the film is Bell’s tribute to his partner’s life’s work and her long-term devotion to her subjects. In the opening scene, Bell remains offscreen, behind the camera, while Mark sits with Blackwell, reviewing their videos and photographs of her adolescence. Mark questions Bell about whether his camera is on, and Bell chuckles and assures her that it is, giving a hint of their working relationship, and suggesting that Mark’s instinct for capturing the moment is as sharp as ever. Similar to both Streetwise and the prevalent motifs of the rest of Mark’s career, Tiny is a series of portraits drawn from daily life. Pike Street is replaced here by Blackwell’s home, and the subjects are Blackwell and her ten children, ages seven to twenty-nine. We learn about Blackwell’s struggles with addiction; about her earliest pregnancy, at age sixteen; and that she’s a survivor of two suicide attempts. Sound and footage from the Streetwise shoot, some of it not used in that film, are woven in: for example, a teenage Blackwell expresses a desire to go to college, to become a professional, like “a person who works on computers and gets paid a lot of money”—in other words, like much of the rest of the city around her.

Material things like money and work, so much at the center of Streetwise, are never really broached by Tiny; instead, the common threads are the familial bonds of love and affection, how they are made and how they are tested across generations. “I always wanted five boys and five girls,” Blackwell says, her voice breaking with emotion. “And I got five boys and five girls.” Bell and Mark allow us to appreciate Blackwell’s accomplishments at the same time that we recognize that many of her own struggles have now become those of her children, and that as biracial people (Blackwell is white; her former partner, with whom she has five children, and who appears in the film, is Black), they face additional challenges that she has never had to endure. Blackwell’s home has replaced Pike Street, but we otherwise return to many of the same institutional spaces seen in Streetwise—jail cells and hospitals—suggesting that the problems of Seattle’s working poor are being managed, rarely mitigated, and never solved.