VIVIAN MAIER

[George Mann]

@Pieter12My argument is that today's Vivian (whoever she is) will very likely find it (whatever it is) in an iPhone.

Perhaps, but a long shot at best.

 

[Pieter12]

@Pieter12 I do not think it's relevant how common or how expensive (or how heavy) Rolleiflex was, compared to today's iPhone. Vivian picked Rolleiflex not because it was uncommon and expensive. Rolleiflex gave her something she wanted. My argument is that today's Vivian (whoever she is) will very likely find it (whatever it is) in an iPhone.

My point is she was interested enough in photography to invest in an expensive camera on a nanny's wages. That does not make her the casual photographer you described in post #84.

 

[Pieter12]

Almost certainly, as it is the camera being used by the vast majority of people at this point. I’m amazed by the technical quality I get from my iPhone camera. Seeing has nothing to do with the type of camera anyway.

Since this thread has become about the iPhone, I disagree that it is an ideal camera besides its size and convenience. I can take pictures much faster with a small film or manual digital camera than a smart phone. I can zone focus, set exposure and shoot from the hip. The phone takes time to focus, needs to be held away from the eye to see and doesn't work well shooting from the hip--you never know what it will focus on. Back to Vivian Maier. She had early exposure to photography (no pun intended), living eight or so years as a child in a household with an award-winning professional portrait photographer. She was not a neophyte or casual photographer.

 

[Pieter12]

@Pieter12 I think you're missing the point. Helge was wondering a few posts above, if there are present day undiscovered Vivians walking the surface of the Earth, and how to discover them. My hypothesis is that they're most likely using an iPhone and if they are to be discovered, Instagram is where I'd look. Just in terms of probabilities involved (everyone has an iPhone) this is very likely true. You seem to be stuck on irrelevant technicalities. And back to Vivian: I have no idea what is a "casual photographer". She clearly loved photography but did not pursue a career in photography. Whatever it is called, it's not rare - there are millions of people like that. What's rare is her talent.

I missed that point because I ignore that member, their posts are most often incomprehensible and when not, insulting. So it goes.

 

[Arthurwg]

The twin-lens reflex camera was particularly well suited to the avoidance of eye contact with her subjects, so perhaps there were some autistic aspects to her personality.

I think she found the perfect tool for her practice. Difficult to imagine those pictures taken with any other camera than a TLR.

 

[Don_ih]

If a new Vivian Maier is out there using an iPhone, I doubt the photos will be discovered and appreciated in 50 years, unless they are appreciated enough to be somehow miraculously preserved now. Most kids I know delete their photos when their storage runs out or when they get a new phone. You don't need a storage locker to store digital photos. And even though you can look through someone's photos on Instagram and go back a couple of years, there's no guarantee that will go one forevermore. In fact, it quite likely can't. You may say that cloud storage is like a storage locker, but they don't sell the contents when you stop paying. They fairly quickly overwrite whatever you had.

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

Perhaps, but a long shot at best.

I agree. She owned a few Rollies and 35mm cameras as well. She seems like she would be prosumer-type photographer who selected her equipment carefully. She developed her own work and one of her printers, Bob Carnie, said she owned enough developers to do 1000 rolls of film what she shot in one of the pictures he printed. He said her negatives were exquisite. So she was a craftsman in her work. She doesn't seem like a person who flips their cellphone every two years.

 

[Arthurwg]

If a new Vivian Maier is out there using an iPhone, I doubt the photos will be discovered and appreciated in 50 years, unless they are appreciated enough to be somehow miraculously preserved now. Most kids I know delete their photos when their storage runs out or when they get a new phone. You don't need a storage locker to store digital photos. And even though you can look through someone's photos on Instagram and go back a couple of years, there's no guarantee that will go one forevermore. In fact, it quite likely can't. You may say that cloud storage is like a storage locker, but they don't sell the contents when you stop paying. They fairly quickly overwrite whatever you had.

External hard drives are the new storage lockers. And file recovery from those will become a new business.

 

[Don_ih]

External hard drives are the new storage lockers. And file recovery from those will become a new business.

Most cell phone photos make it to cloud storage for a short while with the free services of Apple and Google - they tend not to make it to external hard-drives. And those are far from storage lockers - they're closer to being the new floppy disk. Use it for a while then throw it away. Also, if a photographer is unknown and dies with a 3 tb hard drive of exquisite images among his or her otherwise mundane possessions (which includes the iPhone 5 used to capture the images - a device now worth $50, soon to be worth nothing), do you think anyone is going to bother looking at what's on that drive? Say it's not a 3 tb drive but a 500mb one, bought in 2004, uses USB1.1, and is really not worth messing with as a harddrive (it's actually an IDE drive in a case). It would be thrown away untouched.
Hard not to notice a box of prints, though.

 

[Alex Benjamin]

smart phones in 2021 is what Rolleiflex was in the 60s

Quite a few things wrong with the logic at work, here. Other than Rolleiflex, there were a huge amount of very good quality cameras available for the "serious amateur", so singling out the Rolleiflex as a comparison to the iPhone makes little sense. If you're arguing on the angle of quantity and availability to a large segment of the population, you might as well argue that the iPhone is comparable to all of these cameras.

More problematic is the assumption that people with iPhones use it as serious amateur photographers. That's simply not the case. The large majority of iPhone users use it to take snapshots - selfies, families and friends, tourist stuff. So, in that sense, a better comparison would be with the old "instant cameras" or with the Polaroids. Serious amateurs doing the type of street photography that VM did are a tiny minority, the same way film makers working on iPhones are a tiny minority.

This also makes it doubtful that the next Vivian Maier will be using an iPhone. Not impossible, but not more probable than an Holga, a Nikon D3200 or a cheap Yashica-Mat camera bought on eBay for 125 bucks. There's just no way to know.

And this brings me to another point. Because they all have an iPhone, because vintage cameras of all formats can be had cheap, and because it's now affordable to scan your negs and put them on the web, the younger generation of serious amateur photographer are much more willing to flow from one genre to the other than older photographers are. So you do see more and more a young photographer posting stuff done on an iPhone, on a Pentax 67, on a "toy camera" and on a high-end digital or film camera, all on the same website or Instagram account.

Honestly, comparing eras just makes no sense - speaking here as one who has gone through one too many "Is Crosby better than Gretzky" conversations .