Vivian Maier is one of the photographers who secretly lived her passion for photography throughout her life. She spent a large part of her life photographing her environment. Before she died in 2009, all of her works were discovered and shared with the general public and photography enthusiasts through exceptional exhibitions. For an amateur photographer, her photographic archives tell the story of a life and expose the city of New York from a perspective that many people have never seen.
Who is Vivian Maier?
Vivian Maier was born on February 1, 1926, in New York City to a European immigrant family who came to settle in the United States. Her passion for photography came to her while she and her mother were living with Jeanne Bertrand after her parents separated. This famous photographer and talented sculptor gave Vivian Maier a love of photography from an early age.
She discovered France at the age of 6 and left for the United States at the age of 13. Once an adult, she returned to France and decided to devote herself more to photography by taking pictures of her subjects while they were in action. An insatiable enthusiast, for her, every opportunity is good to take pictures and immortalize an event. If the sky is absent from her photos, each shot is both intimate and stifling.
In 2009, she died in a convalescent home after a fall on ice, and thus achieved post-mortem fame.
His career in photography
She took her first photos with a Kodak Brownie before opting for a more advanced model. In her daily life, she worked as a nurse while taking photos, which remained her first passion. In 1956, a family offered her a company apartment whose private bathroom quickly became her darkroom for developing her photos.
The 120,000 negatives, many of which had already been developed, were discovered in 2007 after she died in a storage room that was being auctioned off. Most of her photos are in black and white, but there was a time when she took up colour photography. She excels mainly in street photography and takes very few indoor shots.
For financial reasons, she decided to put photography aside and was even forced to sell her equipment to support herself. This is how all her belongings and undeveloped films ended up in a storage room.
Two years before her death, in 2006, John Maloof discovered her works following the auction of the contents of her storage unit due to unpaid rent. He did not yet realize the magnitude of the work he had come across. The accommodation and observation technique she developed through her photography greatly surprised him. Her works are highly professional for someone who has never studied the fundamentals of photography.
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