The reticent woman seemed most comfortable in the picture frame, provided that she was the one who controlled the shutter. Then there were the self-portraits, often tricks with mirrors or shop-windows, playful and conceptual, with a poker-faced Maier looking straight ahead. Her stealth street pictures relied on subjects being unaware of being photographed, but it was hard to be invisible or discreet as an oddly attired tall woman with a Rolleiflex. Her un-shown pictures seemed sui generis, yet we know that she lived with the photographer Jeanne Bertrand as a child, and visited MoMA’s pioneering 1955 photo exhibition, The Family of Man in New York. Maier, born in New York in 1926, spoke English with an odd French accent-she also spoke and wrote French, and lived in France as a child and a young adult. The back-story was as seductive as the pictures. Later, came a mobbed show at the Chicago Historical Society, reprised in New York (at the prestigious Howard Greenberg Gallery), London and Los Angeles. Maloof put some of the pictures she took with it on the Internet, and then on Flickr, where they went wildly viral. (©Vivian Maier/Maloof Collection, Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York) Vivian Maier carried her Rolleiflex looped around her neck.
0 kommentar(er)
