Who's heard of Vivian Maier?

[Mcary]

The other day I was doing a search on Google for Street photographers and came a crossed a blog that John Maloof put together of Mairer's work and was wondering if any one else had heard of her or was following the Blog.
http://vivianmaier.blogspot.com/

"
Vivian Maier - Her Discovered Work


This was 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 about 100,000 mostly medium format negatives and a ton of undeveloped rolls of film. Born February 1, 1926 and deceased on Tuesday, April 21, 2009."


John Maloof

 

[semilog]

So far as I know, she was totally unknown until Maloof found her trove. It is a truly remarkable body of work.

 

[amateriat]

Remarkable, it is: I've followed this for a while, and the images continue to fascinate. I have a feeling the forthcoming book will be a must-have.


- Barrett

 

[leica M2 fan]

Thanks for posting. Her works is so excellent.

 

[sevres_babylone]

Thank you so much for providing the link. Very interesting story and some excellent work.

 

[dfatty]

wow, the images on that site are wonderful, thanks for posting. i'm a newb and love discovering the work of photographers who are mentioned on rff.

 

[john battaglia]

one of my favorite photographers. if you stop in at central camera in chicago you can strike a conversation about her with some of the old timers, they remember her quite well.

 

[jvan01]

There have already been several threads about Vivian Maier:

http://www.rangefinderforum.com/forums/showthread.php?t=80962

http://www.rangefinderforum.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=81267

http://www.rangefinderforum.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=81834

 

[bmasonoh]

I can't wait to see the book. I suspect the images will be very interesting from what he's shown on the blog. Very mysterious...

 

[scottgee1]

McCary, thanks for bringing this to our attention.

Makes me wonder how many other people labor in obscurity while producing an interesting body of work.

Garry Winogrand also left a huge number of undeveloped rolls, likely because he was so busy shooting AND couldn't afford the processing.

Undeveloped film is a peculiar artifact. To use Ansel Adam's metaphor, the score is composed but has yet to be conducted. We might assume previsualization but until the film is developed, there's no way to know if what was visualized even exists. The 'score' is created in an instant; virtually every other art form has a multiple steps that lead to manifestation.