Vivian Maier and her photography

CMoore said:

I have said it before, so FWIW................ i think she is one of THE Finest photographers that ever walked the Earth.

I will copy and paste that color photo from just a few posts above as an example. Keeping in mind, "Street Photography" is often VERY Fleeting and Unique.

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This is an extraordinary photograph. It's so interesting how photographers - Robert Franck and Gordon Parks being the two most famous examples - include the American flag as trope in order to make the photo both metaphorical but also clearly about America.

I would have love to see the complete roll of this one. It's more than plausible that the two women were looking in front of the them, waiting to cross the street, and I'm wondering if Mayer - feeling it would make a stronger picture - didn't say something, or at least purposefully moved uncomfortably close, in order to have both of them turn towards her.

I agree with you that street photography is fleeting and unique, but I also think that good street photographers also have a bit of the stage director in them.

Don Heisz said:

None of it is reliable. All of it is tainted by the knowledge "oh, now she's famous and wasn't she talented". Practically nothing documentary regarding her photography exists, except the word of people who were per-adolescent at the time the photos were shot.

It's fodder for gawkers.

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I think the Amazon blurb about Professor Bannos' book is a reasonable response to this:
https://www.amazon.com/Vivian-Maier...5c34a&pd_rd_wg=jI4vU&pd_rd_i=022659923X&psc=1

Just came across this thread. I had never heard of her until I was walking around Catania in Eastern Sicily a few years ago. They had an exhibition of her and I went in. As to the technical aspects, she seemed to have a knack to get her exposure spot on, the prints were printed beautifully. I'm assuming she used old thicker emulsions and when printed on modern papers the results were sublime. There is no doubt she had a great eye. But, and this in not her fault, the genre has been done to death.
I don't know who printed her negs for the exhibit I saw but they deserve a lot of credit.

MattKing said:

I think the Amazon blurb about Professor Bannos' book is a reasonable response to this:
https://www.amazon.com/Vivian-Maier...5c34a&pd_rd_wg=jI4vU&pd_rd_i=022659923X&psc=1

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And is there anything greater than what actually fills that blurb? "She explains Maier’s careful adjustments of photographic technique" - isn't that just instructions for developing film? That "Maier was extremely conscientious about how her work was developed, printed, and cropped" is actually normal for anyone who likes taking photos at any level. These are things that are only significant because she has been determined to be someone worthy of scrutiny. "Maier was not a nanny who moonlighted as a photographer; she was a photographer who supported herself as a nanny" is a statement that implies value, that suggests one is more worthwhile than the other, that she could have just as well been working at Taco Bell heating the plastic bags of slop (and even that might be something someone loves doing, you know). Why could she not be "just" a nanny? Is that not worthwhile? Maybe she felt that was her calling - something that gave her a real connection to children. Perhaps that was something she wanted just as much as she wanted to take photos. But all of this and practically everything else is speculative and based on a significance she did not have when alive.

I'm not saying that biography doesn't address the interest of people. But her known life story is a couple of paragraphs long. The rest of it is reading tea leaves. And all of it diminishes the thought and care that went into her photography because it invariably explains it in some most likely irrelevant way and distracts from the photos themselves.

Read Richard Miller's Portrait of a Friendship for a genuine biographical story. It's his experience of his relationship with Brett Weston (this has been mentioned in the Ask a Weston thread, but I read it quite a while ago). It's what some might call "anecdotal" and has no trace of professorly research (except the mining of memory). It's a genuinely human little tale, though, and it is easily as much about Miller as it is about Weston (moreso, I'd say). And it does something probably no biography of Maier can do: it's personal and non-interpretive, it demonstrates nothing yet is insightful.

MattKing said:

I think the Amazon blurb about Professor Bannos' book is a reasonable response to this:
https://www.amazon.com/Vivian-Maier...5c34a&pd_rd_wg=jI4vU&pd_rd_i=022659923X&psc=1

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I agree that is a good description of Vivian Maier and puts her work nicely into context.

I think she's great. Incredible eye for composition and colour, and able to use multiple styles of photography to capture the flavour of the street- candid, portrait, self-portrait, abstract, landscape etc

I do like trying to work out how she did some of her shots. The over the shoulder look is one of her signatures- are they posed, candid or did Vivian attract their attention for the shot? Take the below for example- great subject with red coat and hat, face perfectly lit and framed by the two yellow lines.

In the end, however, it doesn't really matter as the shots are great.

Ste_S said:

I think she's great. Incredible eye for composition and colour, and able to use multiple styles of photography to capture the flavour of the street- candid, portrait, self-portrait, abstract, landscape etc

I do like trying to work out how she did some of her shots. The over the shoulder look is one of her signatures- are they posed, candid or did Vivian attract their attention for the shot? Take the below for example- great subject with red coat and hat, face perfectly lit and framed by the two yellow lines.

In the end, however, it doesn't really matter as the shots are great.

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Fine observations.