Vivian Dorothy Maier (February 1, 1926 - April 21, 2009) is an American street photographer. Maier worked for about forty years as a nanny, mostly in North Shore, Chicago, pursuing photography during his spare time. He took over 150,000 photos during his lifetime, mainly from people and architecture of Chicago, New York City, and Los Angeles, although he also traveled and photographed around the world.
During his lifetime, Maier's photographs were unknown and unpublished; many of the negatives are never printed. A Chicago collector, John Maloof, obtained some Maier photos in 2007, while two other Chicago-based collectors, Ron Slattery and Randy Prow, also found some molds and Maier negatives in the boxes and suitcases at the same time. Maier photos were first published on the Internet in July 2008, by Slattery, but the work received little response. In October 2009, Maloof linked his blog with a selection of Maier photos on the Flickr image sharing website, and the result became viral, with thousands of people expressing interest. Maier's work then drew critical acclaim, and since then, Maier photographs have been exhibited all over the world.
His life and work has been the subject of books and documentaries, including the Finding Vivian Maier film (2013), premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary at the Academy Awards -87.
Video Vivian Maier
Personal life
Much of Maier's life is still unknown. He was born in New York City in 1926, daughter of a French mother, Maria Jaussaud Justin, and Austrian father, Charles Maier (also known as Wilhelm). Several times during his childhood he moved between the US and France, living with his mother in the village of Alpine Saint-Bonnet-en-Champsaur near his mother's family. His father appeared to have left the family temporarily for an unknown reason in 1930. At the 1930 census, the head of the household was listed as Jeanne Bertrand, a successful photographer who knew Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, founder of the Whitney Museum of American Art. When Maier was 4 years old, he and his mother moved to the Bronx with Bertrand, who at the time was a professional photographer.
In 1935, Vivian and his mother lived in Saint-Julien-en-Champsaur and before 1940 returned to New York. His father and brother, Charles, lives in New York. The Charles family, Mary, Vivian and Charles lived in New York in 1940, where his father worked as a steam technician.
In 1951, aged 25, Maier moved from France to New York, where he worked in a sweatshop factory. He moved to North Shore in the Chicago area in 1956, where he worked primarily as a nanny and caregiver for the next 40 years. During his first 17 years in Chicago, Maier worked as a caregiver for two families: Gensburg from 1956 to 1972, and Raymond from 1967 to 1973. Lane Gensburg then said of Maier, "She is as real as Mary Poppins lives," And says she never talking to children and determined to show them the world beyond their prosperous suburbs. The family who hired him described him as very personal and reported that he spent his days walking around Chicago and taking photos, usually with a Rolleiflex camera.
John Maloof, the curator of several Maier photos, summarizes the way the children he looks forward to later describe him:
"He is a Socialist, a feminist, a film critic, and a man like that-is a type of person.He learned English by going to the movies, which he loves... He constantly takes photos, which he does not show even. "
In 1959 and 1960, Maier traveled the world on his own, photographing Los Angeles, Manila, Bangkok, Shanghai, Beijing, India, Syria, Egypt, and Italy. The trip may be financed by the sale of family farms in Saint-Julien-en-Champsaur. For a brief period in the 1970s, Maier worked as a housekeeper for talk-show host Phil Donahue. He keeps his belongings in his master; on one, it has 200 boxes of material. Mostly photographs or negatives, but Maier also collects newspapers, at least in one instance, "pile at shoulder height," and occasionally records the recording of the conversations he has with the people he or she portrays. In the documentary Finding Vivian Maier (2013) and Vivian Maier: Who Takes a Picture Nanny / The Mystery of Vivian Maier (2013), interview with Entrepreneur Maier and their children suggested that Maier surrender himself to others in various ways, with various accents, names, details of life, and that with some children, he has been inspiring and positive, while with others he is scary and rude.
The Gensburg brothers, who Maier treated as children, tried to help him when he became poorer in his old age. When he will be evicted from an inexpensive apartment on the outskirts of Cicero, Gensburg's brothers arranged for him to live in a better apartment on Sheridan Road in the Rogers Park area of ​​Chicago. In November 2008, Maier fell on the ice and hit his head. He was taken to the hospital but failed to recover. In January 2009, she was transferred to a nursing home on the outskirts of Chicago, where she died on April 21, 2009.
Maps Vivian Maier
Invention and introduction
In 2007, two years before he died, Maier failed to keep paying for the storage he rented on Chicago's North Side. As a result, the negative, mold, audio recording, and 8 mm film are auctioned. Three photo collectors bought part of his work: John Maloof, Ron Slattery, and Randy Prow. Maier photographs were first published on the Internet in July 2008 by Slattery, but the work received little response.
Maloof has bought the lion's share of Maier's work, some 30,000 negatives, as he is working on a book on Chicago's environmental history at Portage Park. Maloof then purchased more Maier photos from other buyers at the same auction. Maloof found Maier's name in his box but could not find anything about him until the Google search brought him to Maier's death notice at the Chicago Tribune in April 2009. In October 2009, Maloof linked his blog to the selection of photographs Maier on Flickr, and the result is "viral", with thousands of people expressing interest.
In early 2010, Chicago art collector Jeffrey Goldstein acquired some of the Maier collection from Prow, one of the original buyers. Since the original purchase of Goldstein, the collection has grown to include 17,500 negatives, 2,000 prints, 30 homemade movies, and many slides. In December 2014, Goldstein sold the B & amp; W negative to Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto. Maloof, who manages the Maloof Collection, now has about 90% of Maier's total output, including 100,000 to 150,000 negatives, over 3,000 vintage prints, hundreds of film rolls, home movies, audio recordings and epemera including cameras and documents, 90 percent of his work is known.
Since the posthumous invention, Maier's photographs, and their discoveries, have received international attention in mainstream media, and his work has appeared in exhibitions in galleries, several books, and documentaries.
Legal challenge
In June 2014, lawyers and former photographer David C. Deal filed a lawsuit challenging the current owner's rights from negative Maier to commercialize them. The case seeks to determine whether there is a legal heir to the Maier estate - a cousin in France - which must be recognized under American law. Under copyright laws in the U.S., having photos is different from copyright and the case may take several years to complete, especially since the heir to the estate is living outside the US. Maloof, who owns most of Maier's famous photographs, previously tracked his first cousin after being banished in France and paid him for the rights; However, Deal believes he has found a closer relative in France who may be a plantation beneficiary.
Photography
The photography critic Allan Sekula points out that the fact that Maier spent most of his youth in France sharpened his visual appreciation of American cities and societies. He compared his work to Swiss-born Robert Frank photography: "I consider myself a Robert Frank woman, without a Guggenheim grant, unknown and working as a nanny.I also think she shows women's world and children in a way that has never before been happened before. "
Maloof has said about his work: "Parents gathered in Old Town Old Polish York, dowager dressed in tacky, and the urban African-American experience is all fair game for the Maier lens." Photographer Mary Ellen Mark has compared her work with Helen Levitt, Robert Frank, Lisette Model, and Diane Arbus. Joel Meyerowitz, also a street photographer, said that Maier's work "is filled with the kind of human understanding, warmth, and playfulness that proves he's a 'real shooter'."
The most famous photographs of Maier depict street scenes in Chicago and New York during the 1950s and 1960s. A critic at The Independent wrote that "Chicago shoppers and fine gossip in all their department stores before Maier, but the most interesting are the people on the successful outskirts, the rich Americans in the 1950s and 1960s: children, black servants, homeless people ravaged the shops. "Most of Maier's photos are black and white, and many casual photos of passers-by are caught in moments temporary moments "that still have fundamental gravity and emotions".
In 1952 he bought his first Rolleiflex camera. During his career, he uses Rolleiflex 3.5T, Rolleiflex 3.5F, Rolleiflex 2.8C, Rolleiflex Automat and others. He then also uses Leica IIIc, Ihagee Exakta, Zeiss Contarex and various other SLR cameras.
Writing in The Wall Street Journal, William Meyers notes that because Maier uses medium-format Rolleiflex, rather than 35mm cameras, his picture has more detail than most street photographers. He writes that his work recalls photographs of Harry Callahan, Garry Winogrand, and Weegee, as well as Robert Frank. He also notes that there are many self-portraits in his work, "in many intelligent permutations, as if he were examining his own identity or inserting himself into the environment." Shadow characters, he often took his own shadow, perhaps as a way of being there and simultaneously not quite there. "
Roberta Smith, writing at The New York Times, has drawn attention to how Maier's photographs remind many famous 20th-century photographers, but have their own aesthetic. He wrote that Maier's work "can add to the history of 20th century street photography by summing it up almost entirely encyclopedic, turning close to almost all the famous photographers you can think of, including Weegee, Robert Frank, and Richard Avedon, and then sliding toward etc. But they retain a distinctive calm element, clarity of composition and tenderness characterized by a lack of sudden movement or extreme emotion. "
In the documentary Finding Vivian Maier (2013), the adult children that Maier treated in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s remember how he combined his work as a photographer with his time. job as caregiver. She often takes young children in her care with him to downtown Chicago when she takes her photographs. Sometimes they accompanied him to the rough and broken areas of Chicago, and, on one occasion, in the inventory yard, where a dead sheep was dead.
In the late 1970s, Maier stopped using his Rolleiflex. Most of his photographs taken in the 1980s and 1990s were color transparencies, taken on the film Ektachrome.
Archive
In 2017, the University of Chicago Library announced that the Maier drawing research collection was donated by Maloof.
Publications
Maier photo book
- Vivian Maier: Street Photographer. Brooklyn, NY: powerHouse, 2011. ISBN: 978-1-57687-577-3. Edited by John Maloof. With introduction by Maloof and preface by Geoff Dyer.
- Vivian Maier: Out of the shadows . Chicago, IL: CityFiles, 2012. ISBNÃ, 978-0978545093. Edited by Richard Cahan and Michael Williams.
- Vivian Maier: Self-portrait. Brooklyn, NY: powerHouse, 2013. ISBN 978-1-57687-662-6. Edited by Maloof.
- Eye to Eye: Photos by Vivian Maier. Chicago, IL: CityFiles, 2014. ISBNÃ, 9780991541805. Edited and with text by Richard Cahan and Michael Williams.
- Vivian Maier: Discovered Photographer. London: Harper Design, 2014. ISBNÃ, 9780062305534. Edited by Maloof with text by Marvin Heiferman and Howard Greenberg.
Books on Maier
- Vivian Maier: Life and Life of a Photographers' Suffix . Chicago: University of Chicago, 2017. By Pamela Bannos. ISBN: 978-0226470757.
- Vivian Maier Growing: The Real Story of Nanny Photographer. Brooklyn, NY: powerHouse, 2018. By Ann Marks. ISBN 978-1576879030.
Movie documentary about Maier
- Vivian Maier: Who's Taking the Nanny Draw (2013) - directed by Jill Nicholls, produced by BBC
- Mystery of Vivian Maier 2013) - cut back and released in the US
- Search for Vivian Maier (2013) - directed by Maloof and Charlie Siskel
- The Woman in the Mirror (2017) - directed by Ryan Alexander Huang, short biographical film
Exhibition
See also
- Angelo Rizzuto
- Charles Jones
- Paraska Plytka-Horytsvit
References
External links
- The John Maloof Collection website at Vivian Maier
- Finding Vivian Maier - Interview with Producer, Charlie Siskel Co-Director by Stephen Slaughter Head, PostMovie.net, 2014
- "Vivian Maier: The Unheralded Street Photographer" by David Zax, Smithsonian magazine, 2011
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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