Vivian Maier is arguably one of the best photographers in history. She was born in New York City in 1926 and spent most of her childhood living in France. She moved to Chicago and worked as a nanny for nearly 40 years. During those years she took over 100,000 photographs of street photography and portraits. However, she kept her passion for photography a total secret, and forbade anyone from entering her room (which contained hundreds of film rolls, left unprocessed). Nobody knew of her photography career until around 2007, where her storage contents were auction in Chicago.
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| One of Maier's masterpieces. |
John Maloof acquired a bunch of her photographs during the auction and spent over a year trying to determine who the photographer was. It was difficult for him, because Vivian Maier never gave her true name on any records or receipts, she always used an alias. However John Maloof was able to work with the many self portraits she took, in which she is never looking at the camera.
John Maloof now owns nearly 90% of Maier's work and is receiving donations to continue unraveling her work, though he claims that this money is not going to the benefit of himself. There are still hundred of unprocessed film waiting to be discovered, and among those include short movie clips Maier made as well. As a young nanny in the 50s, she would take the kids out to show them the world around their little neighborhood. They would walk and walk in undeveloped parts of town, and take pictures of nearly everything she saw. She found great joy in her photography, and on days off she could be spotted wandering around town with her camera. She even took photos in color; about 700 film rolls consist of colored images. The reason that Vivian has so many undeveloped rolls of film is because she had to put everything in storage at the times of financial crisis in the 1990s.
The first camera she used was a Kodak Brownie Box Camera, which had no focus control, no aperture dial, and only one shutterspeed, so she didn't have much freedom with managing the lighting in her photographs. This was a great obstacle for Vivian's photographic intentions, so later she bought a Rolleiflex (double lens) camera. This gave her more freedom with lighting, but was still difficult to use, because it's hard to get your photo angle right.
I chose to write about Vivian Maier because I think her work is fantastic. Just the click of a button and her photos turn out beautiful. Most of her life was kept secret, and she chose not to share too much private information with anybody. Her photos are beyond amazing and it's hard to believe why she didn't share such a skill with anyone else. The project that I'm working on now is portrait photography, and I think Vivian Maier's work would be a great inspiration, especially since I have some struggles in both portrait and street photography. I also don't really find portrait photography all that enjoyable - I like photographing portraits but just don't find the pictures very appealing. There are only a small amount of photos that I've seen that I think are wonderful. However as soon as I saw Vivian Maier's photos, I wonder how any photographer could photograph such beautiful images. As I said before, I hope to gain some inspiration from her portrait photography, so I can photograph just like her. I know that I will never be able to reach up to her standards, but I may learn a little something from her. Whenever I go out to shoot portrait photos, I'm always so shy and scared to go up to someone and ask if I can take their photo. I'm afraid of rejection, most of all. I'm also afraid of taking candids, where the photographed person is unaware of my presence. As long as they don't see me, I'm fine, but if they do catch me I always wonder if they'll sue me or force me to delete the picture (which I can't, since I use film cameras). Last year, in photography class as a beginner student I would shoot portrait photos, but I would always fail miserably. I just don't have the "touch" for portrait photography, whereas I do for micro images.
As I was out shooting portraits the other day, I had a lens that zoomed really close to the subject. Now, this was advantageous in some aspects, but in other aspects it was difficult to use. For example, I found a middle eastern family and decided to take their picture, but since I was at KLCC park right next to the fountain, I had to back up really far to get them all in the picture, almost to the point where I was literally stepping into the fountain. I don't know how the image turned out, but hopefully it turned out okay because I think middle eastern people are interesting photograph subjects (they have an Arab look with European eyes, and I find that interesting).
Watch the video below to learn more about Vivian.
