Pioneers Of Street Photography - II

To celebrate the 1st anniversary of #TheStreetFactor, we present to you
the second part of a series of journals dedicated to the great masters:
The Pioneers of Street Photography.




Vivian Maier
(February 1, 1926 – April 21, 2009)
was an American street photographer born in New York City.

Although born in the U.S., it was in France that Maier spent most of her youth.
Maier returned to the U.S. in 1951 where she took up work as a nanny and care-giver for the rest of her life.

In her leisure however, Maier had begun to venture into the art of photography.
Consistently taking photos over the course of five decades, she would ultimately
leave over 100,000 negatives, most of them shot in Chicago and New York City.




Untitled, Undated
_{www.vivianmaier.com}



Vivian would further indulge in her passionate devotion to
documenting the world around her through homemade films, recordings and collections,
assembling one of the most fascinating windows into American life in the second half of the twentieth century.




Undated, New York, NY
_{www.vivianmaier.com}



Her photographs remained unknown and mostly undeveloped and unprinted until they were discovered
by a local historian, John Maloof, in 2007.
Following Maier's death, her work began to receive critical acclaim.




Untitled, Undated
_{www.vivianmaier.com}



Her photographs have been exhibited in the US, England, Germany, Denmark, and Norway, and have appeared
in newspapers and magazines in the US, England, Germany, Italy, France and other countries.
A book of her photography titled Vivian Maier: Street Photographer was published in 2011.*




June, 1971
_{www.vivianmaier.com}



Maier’s photos also betray an affinity for the poor, arguably because of an emotional kinship she felt with those struggling to get by.
Her thirst to be cultured led her around the globe.




July 10, 1959
_{www.vivianmaier.com}



She traveled to Canada in 1951 and 1955, in 1957 to South America, in 1959 to Europe, the Middle East, and Asia,
in 1960 to Florida, in 1965 she’d travel to the Caribbean Islands, and so on.




1959, Egypt
_{www.vivianmaier.com}



It is to be noted that she traveled alone and gravitated toward the less fortunate in society.




1953, New York, NY
_{www.vivianmaier.com}



Her travels to search out the exotic caused her to seek out the unusual in her own backyard as well.
Whether it was the overlooked sadness of Yugoslavian émigrés burying their Czar, the final go-around at the legendary stockyards,
a Polish film screening at the Milford Theater’s Cinema Polski, or Chicagoans welcoming home the Apollo Crew,
she was a one-person documenting impresario, documenting what caught her eye, in photos, film and sound.




September, 1953, New York, NY
_{www.vivianmaier.com}



The personal accounts from people who knew Vivian are all very similar.
She was eccentric, strong, heavily opinionated, highly intellectual, and intensely private.
She wore a floppy hat, a long dress, wool coat, and men’s shoes and walked with a powerful stride.




January 9, 1957, Florida
_{www.vivianmaier.com}



With a camera around her neck whenever she left the house,
she would obsessively take pictures, but never showed her photos to anyone.
An unabashed and unapologetic original.



 


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Excerpts and Photographs shamelessly lifted and edited from:
- www.vivianmaier.com -
- *Wikipedia -</sub>