Streetwise - Mary Ellen Mark

MARK, Mary Ellen & Martin Bell.
Streetwise.
First edition. 8vo. 128pp with b&w plates in printed wraps. Japanese text. Tokyo: Euro Spece, 1986.
Near fine copy.

The book of the film Streetwise by Martin Bell, Mary Ellen Mark and Cheryl McCall- which portray’s the lives of 9 teenagers growing up on the streets in Seattle. This is the film programme and book for the first Tokyo showing in 1986, and preceeds the american book of Streetwise by 2 years.

From the 1988 introduction: ‘The children of Pike Street are runaways; when I first saw Mary Ellen Mark’s photographs of them–in the spring of 1983–I knew they were perfect characters for an important story, because they were both perfect and important victims. The characters in any important story are always victims; even the survivors of an important story are victims. At the time, Seattle’s Green River Killer had already murdered 28 young girls, yet the teenagers of Pike Street were holding their own –pimps, prostitutes, and petty thieves, they were eating out of dumpsters, falling in love, getting tattooed, being treated for the variety of venereal diseases passed on to them by their customers. / All teenagers plan for unlikely futures–“three yachts or more”–and lifetime lovers, but the children of Pike Street must conduct their dreaming in the presence of expediencies far darker than most Americans can imagine. Tiny is a fourteen-year-old girl, malnourished, an accomplished prostitute with a lengthy record of occupational diseases; her alcoholic mother says that Tiny’s prostitution is “just a phase.” Dewayne is a sixteen-year-old boy; he visits his father, a failed arsonist, in prison. Dewayne’s father fails as a father, too; Dewayne is one of the victims of Pike Street who won’t survive this story–‘ .