In April 1983, reporter Cheryl McCall and photographer Mary Ellen Mark went to Seattle to write an article about the children who have fled it from their home for a Life magazine assignment.
They have chosen Seattle because it is the ideal city of America. If they manage to find children who have left their home in Seattle, then they will be all over America and so there is a big social problem.
They spent their first days driving around the city, trying to find a place where children might be.
Mary Ellen Mark will never forget the day she first saw them standing on a wall in Pike Street. They had passed through this wall many times and it was empty, but not at four and a half in the afternoon. At that time, the wall became a meeting place for the children, and Mary Ellen Mark and Cheryl McCall started their story on that wall.
On this wall they met Lou, Erin, Rat, Mike, Patti, Munchkin, Annie, Dewayne, Erica, Lilie and many other children who allowed the photographer and the reporter to follow and record their lives on the streets.
In July 1983, the article was published in Life magazine entitled “Streets of the Lost”. In 1984 Martin Bell directed the documentary Streetwise.
In the links below you can see all the photos from Mary Ellen Mark’s book Streetwise, as well as the article as published in LIFE magazine.
http://www.maryellenmark.com/…/streetw…/index001_stwise.html
http://www.maryellenmark.com/text/magazines/life/905W-000-021.html
Photography: Mike & Rat, 1983
