Vivian Maier Shooting in Obscurity - negs discovered

pesphoto

pesphoto

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A photographer in Chicago recently purchased the negatives of a
photographer from an estate sale and is posting them online. No one
ever heard of her until now. She had 1000 undeveloped rolls of film he
is going thru. This is worth following. He is posting her work here


http://vivianmaier.blogspot.com/
 
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Quite a bit of the photos on the blog are NYC, not Chicago. I'd guess she either visited or lived there for a while.
She had a great eye and skill with that camera. Some very powerful stuff.
 
I think that there's a lesson or two (or three) here for all of us. This woman accomplished this with a twin-lens reflex camera, probably a Rolleiflex. She used just one lens and managed to come up with great compositions with the square format. She wasn't afraid of her subjects, nor were they afraid of her. For the most part they were well aware that she was there.

Think about it next time you agonize over which camera(s) to take, which lenses, how are you ever going to get up the nerve to photograph strangers, OMG! what if they see you? She probably had more than on keeper on every 12 exposure roll too!
 
Al Kaplan said:
I think that there's a lesson or two (or three) here for all of us. This woman accomplished this with a twin-lens reflex camera, probably a Rolleiflex. She used just one lens and managed to come up with great compositions with the square format. She wasn't afraid of her subjects, nor were they afraid of her. For the most part they were well aware that she was there.

Think about it next time you agonize over which camera(s) to take, which lenses, how are you ever going to get up the nerve to photograph strangers, OMG! what if they see you? She probably had more than on keeper on every 12 exposure roll too!
Click to expand...

well said....
 
Rolleiflex

Rolleiflex

pesphoto said:
im sure someone can tell us the make of the camera
Click to expand...

It's a Rolleiflex for sure. Looks like one of the last models with the smaller focussing knob. MX Type 1 or Type 2. Made up to 1954.

She had a great eye for the square negative.

Thanks for posting.
 
Al Kaplan said:
I think that there's a lesson or two (or three) here for all of us. This woman accomplished this with a twin-lens reflex camera, probably a Rolleiflex. She used just one lens and managed to come up with great compositions with the square format. She wasn't afraid of her subjects, nor were they afraid of her. For the most part they were well aware that she was there.

Think about it next time you agonize over which camera(s) to take, which lenses, how are you ever going to get up the nerve to photograph strangers, OMG! what if they see you? She probably had more than on keeper on every 12 exposure roll too!
Click to expand...

Well put. I recall reading about Ruth Orkin. She asked a male photog for advice and he told her to get a TLR because a girl could not deal with a variety of lenses... she took that famous "American Girl in Italy" shot of a bunch of guys ogling a girl walking down a Rome street.

http://images.google.ca/images?hl=en&source=hp&q=ruth+orkin+american+girl+in+italy&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ei=aY_TSpLnFZPAlAfOwcmFAw&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ct=title&resnum=1&ved=0CBkQsAQwAA
 
Beautiful work. I'm quite taken by the similarity of subject matter and vision between her work and some of the early Friedlander work of the early 60's.
 
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