9. Street Portraits - Vivian Maier





"A riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma."

'Piecing together Vivian Maier’s life can easily evoke Churchill’s famous quote about the vast land of Tsars and commissars that lay to the east. A person who fit the stereotypical European sensibilities of an independent liberated woman, accent and all, yet born in New York City. Someone who was intensely guarded and private, Vivian could be counted on to feistily preach her own very liberal worldview to anyone who cared to listen, or didn’t. Decidedly unmaterialistic, Vivian would come to amass a group of storage lockers stuffed to the brim with found items, art books, newspaper clippings, home films, as well as political tchotchkes and knick-knacks.'

Vivian Maier was a nanny by occupation, but she has now wowed the world with her photography in which she captured some of the most interesting and peculiar aspects of Urban America from the 1950's.

'An American of French and Austro-Hungarian extraction', Vivian travelled back and forth from Europe to the United States before settling in New York City in 1951. She first picked up photography only two years before her move, and she began oaring the streets of the Big City reefing her artistic technique and ways. By 1956 Maier had moved from New York to Chicago, where she spent most of the rest of her years working as a nanny. Maier would spend her free time photographing, her photographs were hidden, rarely seen by the eyes of others. She took photographs into the the late 1990's, by which she'd collected a large body of work, accumulating over 100,000 negatives which were eventually left behind. Maier's passion for documentary led her to create a series of films and audio recordings at her home. These films would include interesting bits of America, demolition of buildings and landmarks for modern development, and the unseen lives of various cultures and the poor, as well as some of Chicago's most cherished sites, all of which Vivian catalogued. 

Vivian did become very poor later in her life, and although several of the children which she nannied got her an apartment and took good care of her, unknown to them there was a storage locker in Maier's name, which due to delinquent payments, was auctioned off. These storage lockers stored Maier's huge collection of negatives which she secretly stashed through her lifetime. 

In 2007 Maier's large body of work came to light, it was discovered in a local thrift auction house in Chicago. It was purchased by John Maloof, who discovered Maier's particular eye for photography. From here, Vivian Maier's work would impact the world over and changed the life of Maloof when he brought it to the public's eye. 


"It took me days to look through all of her work. It inspired me to pick up photography myself. Little by little, as I progressed as a photographer, I would revisit Vivian's negatives and I would "see" more in her work. I bought her same camera and took to the same streets soon to realize how difficult it was to make images of her caliber. I discovered the eye she had for photography through my own practice. Needless to say, I am attached to her work."

John Maloof
"After some researching, I have only little information about Vivian. Central Camera (110 yr old camera shop in Chicago) has encountered Vivian from time to time when she would purchase film while out on the Chicago streets. From what they knew of her, they say she was a very "keep your distance from me" type of person but was also outspoken. She loved foreign films and didn't care much for American films.

Some of her photos have pictures of children and often times it was near a beach. I later found out she was a nanny for a family on the North Side whose children these most likely were. One of her obituaries states that she lived in Oak Park, a close Chicago suburb, but I later found that she lived in the Rogers Park neighbourhood.

Out of the more than 100,000 negatives I have in the collection, about 20-30,000 negatives were still in rolls, undeveloped from the 1960's-1970's. I have been successfully developing these rolls. I must say, it's very exciting for me. Most of her negatives that were developed in sleeves have the date and location penciled in French (she had poor penmanship).

I found her name written with pencil on a photo-lab envelope. I decided to 'Google' her about a year after I purchased these only to find her obituary placed the day before my search. She passed only a couple of days before that inquiry on her.

I wanted to meet her in person well before I found her obituary but, the auction house had stated she was ill, so I didn't want to bother her. So many questions would have been answered if I had."



Using Vivian Maier's work to look at street photography.

Undated, New York, NY
I am a huge fan of Vivian Maier's work, especially when it comes to looking at true street photography. Her photographs vary from day to day street shots of people walking, doing their every day routine and then she has portrait photographs, where you know the subject has seen she's taking a photograph.
My favourite thing about Vivian Maier's work is the fact that in some photographs, the subject is completely oblivious, completely unaware, and Vivian is essentially invisible to them. This, personally, is what I consider to be true street photography, being invisible. You capture the true essence of people, of what they do on the street. And there is no interference from the camera. 
There's always the possibility that when you're taking photographs of people you do not know, and they realise you're taking a photograph, they will react. They might smile, or they might frown, knowing you're taking a photograph without their consent. Being invisible allows you to capture their true expression, not an expression of shock or uncertainty. This is something, if I were to try more street photographs myself, I would like to capture, but with regards to this brief I must approach the subject.


Here are two of my favourite Vivian Maier street portraits. The subjects aren't smiling or frowning, they're just photographed as they are. Their eyes seem to stand out to me, so clear and crisp, and they stare straight back at you. Something I want to capture in my own street portraits. I also like the relaxed stance that the subject are carrying, no tension, no uncomforted, just as they are. These are true street portraits, and is something I wouldn't mind trying in the future. I also like the effect black and white photography has on the images, the fact that they are black and white add to the authenticity of the photographs in my opinion. Use film for my portraits? 


She also had a great sense of composition when taking her photographs. For someone who never studied photography, and it was only her interest that flared her, she developed a particular sense of composition and style throughout her photographs. 
On the left hand side here we have one of Vivian Maiers best photographs, in my opinion, with regards to composition. It's a simple photograph of the bottom side of a bridge in New York City. What draws my eye to this photograph is the shadows, and the recurrence of lines throughout the photographs, even the repetition of the windows on the right hand side of photograph adds to its layout and distribution of content. 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

5. Fake or Not?

Image
Fake or Not? There are many issues surrounding Documentary Photographs, and the main one is the veracity of the photographs and if they are fake or real? Here are two very recognisable documentary photographs.  The one on the left is Arthur Rothstein's photograph 'Cattle Skull, Badlands', 1936. Rothstein was part of the Farm Security Administration, or the 'FSA', and was one of many photographers who were commissioned to photograph and document the effect that the Depression had on many rural parts of America. The 'FSA' was created to stress the efforts that must have been made to improve the lifestyle of share croppers  tenants  very poor landowning farmers and attempt to relocate them to land more suitable for their farming needs. The 'FSA' is very well known for it's influential photography program, even though it was small, between the years of 1935-1944 . Other images by Rothstein? Same Skulls? To begin we have the problem tha
Read more

29. Going for the New Topographics approach.

Image
Immediately, from my own interest and also from the root I'm going down, I know I want to be looking at the New Topographics, for research and for any inspiration. As I'm looking at man made buildings in the natural landscape, I feel that the New Topographics would be very suitable for me to research. Their photographs focused on Man-Altered Landscapes, and I feel that 'Castles' could very much, be a part of this theme Bernd and Hilla Becher The Bechers are the most recognised New Topographic Photographers, to me personally in any case. I know, from previous research that the Bechers would document the same features of various factories and industrial sites, that they believed were slowly fading and being demolished. From the MoMA Website: "The German artists Bernd and Hilla Becher, who began working together in 1959 and married in 1961, are best known for their "typologies"—grids of black-and-white photographs of variant examples of a singl
Read more