For some reason, last night, YouTube’s algorithm suggested a not-so-interesting video about a street photographer with whom I had limited knowledge. My watching some portion of the vid generated suggestions for others and finally the gem: Documentary “Finding Vivian Maier“, which I watched in its entirety this evening.
Quick backstory: A large portion of her collection of media—including more than 150,000 negatives, hundreds of undeveloped film rolls, audio recordings, and home movies—were auctioned in 2007; she had failed to keep up payments on a storage unit. Vivian Maier was an unknown, unpublished photographer at the time; she died in April 2009, following a fall, unaware that her street shots had started to draw attention after some were published on Flickr.
She worked as a nanny for much of her adult life, allowing the freedom to get out on the streets—primarily Chicago and New York—with a camera, typically one of several iterations of medium format Rolleiflex. The bulk of her best work spans from the 1950s into the 1970s. Watch the film, if you like a good investigation mystery (and biography).
The Featured Image is a screenshot from the film’s closing, of a Vivian Maier self-portrait being developed.