I recently found out about this photographer, an American lady named Vivian Maier, who in her lifetime amassed a huge collection of photographs documenting the streetlife of her time. The official website has the whole story:
"An American of French and Austro-Hungarian extraction, Vivian bounced between Europe and the United States before coming back to New York City in 1951. Having picked up photography just two years earlier, she would comb the streets of the Big Apple refining her artistic craft. By 1956 Vivian left the East Coast for Chicago, where she’d spend most of the rest of her life working as a caregiver. In her leisure Vivian would shoot photos that she zealously hid from the eyes of others. Taking snapshots into the late 1990′s, Maier would leave behind a body of work comprising over 100,000 negatives. Additionally Vivian’s passion for documenting extended to a series of homemade documentary films and audio recordings. Interesting bits of Americana, the demolition of historic landmarks for new development, the unseen lives of ethnics and the destitute, as well as some of Chicago’s most cherished sites were all meticulously catalogued by Vivian Maier.
A free spirit but also a proud soul, Vivian became poor and was ultimately saved by three of the children she had nannied earlier in her life. Fondly remembering Maier as a second mother, they pooled together to pay for an apartment and took the best of care for her. Unbeknownst to them, one of Vivian’s storage lockers was auctioned off due to delinquent payments. In those storage lockers lay the massive hoard of negatives Maier secretly stashed throughout her lifetime.
Maier’s massive body of work would come to light when in 2007 her work was discovered at a local thrift auction house on Chicago’s Northwest Side. From there, it would eventually impact the world over and change the life of the man who championed her work and brought it to the public eye, John Maloof."
What I find most appealing about Vivians photography is her containment of a certain energy and spirit of the time. Working her way through Chicago and New York in the 50's, she elegantly captures this iconic time in a vast series of tiny moments and anonymous portraits of her time - hundreds of people, many glamorously chic, the first embodiment of "streetstyle", and many others timeworn and destitute but never victims of pity. Never taking advantage of her subject, Vivian Maier dedicated herself to capturing, but not changing, the curious world she lived in.
I would urge you all to check out the rest of her work online - each photograph is a moment of beauty. All photos credited to Vivian Maier
