I think this is pretty amazing.

Whilst digging into the topic of photography on YouTube I came across the story of Vivian Maier.

In the mid 1950’s Vivian lived in Chicago’s North Shore area where she worked a nanny. She was a very private person who would spend her days off walking the local streets and taking photographs with her Rolleiflex camera. Later she would travel solo around the world doing much the same.

During her life she remained totally unknown and unpublished as a photographer.

It was not until the end of her life, when she failed to keep up payments on a storage space she had been using, that a huge amount of negatives (around 30,000!), prints, 8mm film and audio tapes were discovered.

These photos are incredible. And beautiful. And moving.

The fact that they were taken utterly for her own pleasure…and that were it not for happenstance they might have never been discovered, makes it all the more remarkable. 

This short video explores a tiny sampling of her work in the context of today’s social media ecosystems (such as Facebook and Instagram).

Today’s creative culture where the dopamine-fuelled motivator to take photos (or write blogs for that matter) has made the whole creative process somewhat forced, performative and manufactured.

It’s all about validation. It’s all about the likes.

I found Vivian Maiers’s story (and I’m sure it was a life far more complex than I have portrayed here) of art for its own sake to be aspirational and refreshing. 

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Reference: Vivian Maier. (2024, July 26). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivian_Maier