Mary Ellen Mark's Tiny in Her Halloween Costume is an iconic portrait of a 14-year-old girl who, in 1983, was working as a prostitute at First Avenue and Pike Street in downtown Seattle. Hidden behind bangs and the mesh veil of a postwar French whore, Tiny's eyes are mostly unforthcoming. But her thin lips, bent into the arc of a frown, form a perfect rainbow of expression. Like a Diane Arbus picture without the expert prurience, or a Walker Evans that sloughs off the noble cast of poverty, Tiny in Her Halloween Costume seemed to me like the definitive image of this girl—hardened and haughty in her too-literal dress-up clothes.

Then I saw the movie. The documentary Streetwise, gloriously directed by Mark's husband, Martin Bell, a year after her original photographs were published by Life magazine, gives us the pleasures and privations behind that cumulative frown. And it's not just Tiny (who's terribly pretty when she smiles): We meet her wiry crush Rat, who's subsisting out of garbage bins and suffering from chronic tonsillitis; and Dewayne, a quiet, worried kid who presses his father's hand through the glass at the county jail; and a cloud of girls who drift between pimps just a few years older than they are.

Along with Photographic Center Northwest's exhibition of Mark's photographs of Tiny through their many years of friendship (open now through October 31), on Sunday, October 8, at 2:00 p.m the Frye Art Museum is screening Streetwise (1984), along with its short sequel Erin (2005), in which we learn that Tiny is now the mother of nine children. And you'll get a chance to hear Mary Ellen Mark, Martin Bell, and—best of all—Erin Charles (AKA Tiny) talk about their parts in the decades-long project that began on Seattle's downtown streets.