Mary Ellen Mark was a larger-than-life personality who made her life behind the camera, and next to it. From the outset of her career in photography, she had a unique way of communicating with her subjects to present their reality.

In a recent Time Lightbox feature, in which she was asked to tell about the one photograph she made that she believe jump-started her career, garnered international attention, or simply reflected her early interest in photography, she spoke about a photograph she made of a lovely girl, in Turkey, in 1965.

She said, “I don’t like to photograph children as children. I like to see them as adults, as who they really are. I’m always looking for the side of who they might become. Emine was being very seductive in her own nine-year-old way. It’s interesting to me that she would show me that side of herself.

© Mary Ellen Mark, Beautiful Emine posing, Trabzon, Turkey, 1965.

“When I came back from Turkey and developed the film, I saw this picture and knew it was something special. I had been photographing for a couple of years before this, and I felt that sometimes you are looking and looking, and you are not sure what you are looking for. Often you look for the cliché and what you think makes a picture. This was the first time I felt I went beyond that. I thought this photograph transcended the image and had an edge.”

Mary Ellen was working on a new book about another subject from the early days of her career, Tiny, a young prostitute from Seattle who she has photographed over the last 30 years. Her husband, filmmaker Martin Bell, is making a film about Tiny and her ten children. The new book, Tiny: Streetwise Revisited, will be published by Aperture in the fall. She said, “Going back is something that’s always fascinating to me. I would have liked to photograph Emine again."

The information in this post was drawn from the March 11, 2015 edition of Lightbox.