Blog post #6

- June 09, 2020

Vivian Maier

A few years ago, I was in search of a Rolleiflex camera and upon researching about this camera online, I came across an amazing photographer named Vivian Maier. She, with her Rolleiflex, has shot thousands of incredible photographs of the people and city of Chicago, sparking my love for street photography (and the camera also!).

Yet, digging deeper into this photographer's background, I realized that, unlike her well-known photographs, her life was, in contrast, very private. In fact, her work almost never got to publicity, not until a realtor named John Maloof stumbled upon a box of Vivian's negatives at an auction house that he paid $400 for. He realized how good they were, and started posting them on Flickr. The pictures quickly got noticed by photographers around the world, but sadly, it was after Vivian's death.

Vivian Maier was born in New York in 1926. She worked as a nanny in New York, and later moved to Chicago in the 1950s. According to the few people that knew her, Maier was a real eccentric nanny that kids always want to be with. She would take them to shows and plays, and get them on wild adventures exploring the city. However, she was a very private person, and was not fond of strangers. As for the reason why she chose to be a nanny, I guess it was a career that could give her the freedom to enjoy her passion as a street photographer.

In Maier's photos, her subjects are sometimes caught looking at her camera, seemingly making eye contact with her. But she used a Rolleiflex, which is a twin-lens camera that has a waist-level viewfinder requiring the photographer to look down when taking a picture. Thus, she might not have even interacted with her subjects, and many of them would have not even known that they had their pictures taken. This makes her photos have something of a documentary style, telling candid stories of the people and the city.

Her images capture interesting views of the people of the city, seemingly having a story in each photos without having to be accompanied with any captions. It is sad that Maier was not featured in Rexer's book under the chapter about Street Photography. However, she was mentioned in the chapter about Self-portrait. And indeed, similar to her street photographs, in her self portraits, she also incorporated images of herself inside the city that she lived in, taking herself as her subject and telling her own story and passion of street photography.