Vivian Maier: eccentric amateur street photographer or maverick?
Vivian Maier – Her Discovered Work Created in dedication to the photographer Vivian Maier, a street photographer from the 1950s – 1990s. Vivian’s work was discovered at an auction here in Chicago where she resided most of her life. Her discovered work includes over 100,000 mostly medium format negatives, thousands of prints, and countless undeveloped rolls of film. More @ http://vivianmaier.blogspot.com/
The profundities and oddities of Vivian Maier’s life and work have been a great inspiration for those of us who have come to know her through her photographs. One of the most difficult challenges that an artist faces involves how to accommodate life’s basic needs while finding the time and means for the pursuit of making art. The brilliance of Maier’s problem-solving abilities comes to light through her choice of occupation. Working as a nanny allowed her to solve not only life’s hierarchy of needs: food, clothing and shelter; it also provided a foundation for her to fulfill her personal need to take photographs. Vivian Maier’s way of life speaks to what all artists and individuals strive to achieve in one form or another: coming to terms with their personal sense of beauty through pursuit of one’s own purpose. More @ http://vivianmaierprints.com/
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. The story of this nanny who has now wowed the world with her photography, and who incidentally recorded some of the most interesting marvels and peculiarities of Urban America in the second half of the twentieth century is seemingly beyond belief. More @ http://www.vivianmaier.com/
Vivian Maier (February 1, 1926 – April 21, 2009) was an American amateur street photographer who was born in New York but grew up in France, and after returning to the U.S., worked for about forty years as a nanny in Chicago. During those years she took about 100,000 photographs, primarily of people and cityscapes most often in Chicago, although she traveled and photographed worldwide. Her photographs remained unknown and mostly undeveloped until they were discovered by a local historian, John Maloof, in 2007. Following Maier’s death her work began to receive critical acclaim.
Her photographs have appeared in newspapers in Italy, Argentina, and England, and have been exhibited alongside other artists’ work in Denmark and Norway; her first solo exhibition ran at the Chicago Cultural Center from January 8 until April 3, 2011. Vivian Maier’s first private gallery exhibition, “Vivian Maier, Photographer” took place in the spring of 2011 at Russell Bowman Art Advisory in Chicago from April 15 through June 18, 2011. All works from this exhibition came from the Jeffrey Goldstein collection also known as Vivian Maier Prints Inc.
The “Vivian Maier, Photographer” exhibition will be traveling from Russell Bowman Art Advisory to the Hearst Gallery in Manhattan courtesy of the Hearst Corporation, from July 18, 2011 to January 31, 2012. More @ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivian_Maier
More Vivian Maier Images
Thomas Martin Photo & Paint 