A few weeks ago a photographer friend of mine, Richard Sayer (Sayer’s namesake), passed on a link to me that made my head spin. It was a blog dedicated to the recently discovered photographer, Vivian Maier. She was a street photographer & nanny that had a prolific collection of photos that were discovered by John Maloof at an auction in Chicago. John had such a strong reaction to her work, that he has been documenting, scanning, & unfolding all the information that he can find about this mysterious lady. The Chicago Tonight show, did a feature on her work that can be seen here.
It was these first two self portraits of Vivian that really sucked me in. I absolutely love them. Since seeing them, there has been a lot more information unleashed- a documentary film is being made, a book, along with a museum show in Chicago. The whole story is really fascinating to me & I knew that I wanted to write a post about it all. I’ve been seeing her photos pop up in the blog world lately, like here & here. But I never can get enough of a good thing. There are tons and tons of photos to choose from and they are all wonderful. What really struck me about a lot of her photos is her ability to capture relationships between pairs. She has a lot of pictures of sweet & vulnerable moments between, friends, couples, strangers, and children. So in the spirit of spreading the word, here is a handful to browse through…
I find both the story of how her work was discovered & her photography itself, inspiring. Looking through the published photos makes me shiver. I’m grateful to my friend for passing on the link to me. It’s pretty exciting to know that this project that John Maloof started is really taking off! Check out this video if you have a few minutes. Enjoy!