#John Maloof

[kodachrome-net]

The negative is comparable to the composer's score, and the print to its performance.

Ansel Adams, quoted in Viviane Maier: A Photographer Found, by John Maloof and Marvin Heiferman

[unrighteousbooks]

Sometimes we are unaware of the people around us. Now and then, they reappear unexpectedly. That is the case with Vivian Maier. This book, by John Maloof and the Howard Greenberg Gallery, contains an exceptional collection of Maier's photography. She passed away in 2009, and her work was all but unknown during her lifetime. This book was first published by Harper Design in 2014. Meanwhile, When the Gods Are Silent, by Mikhail Soloviev, which made an appearance in one of Maier's photos from 1954, can still be found in bookstores such as Aziraphale's Books.

[addictivecontradiction]

Finding Vivian Maier, 2013

[paolo-streito-1264]

Vivian Maier. John Maloof Collection, October 18, 1953, New York City.

[skinslip]

I am haunted by Vivian Maier.

I see her photos and her indelible face when I write.

I am haunted by her absolutely impeccable photos, by her inability to look at herself in photos, her primary focus on everyone but herself.

More than any other artist Maier's work informs my art.

Some of her photos capture a quiet, desperate melancholy of their subjects. Including herself. These are the photos my own gloom can be found.

Her self portraits are my favorite and I find them to be the most fascinating. She almost never looks directly into the camera.

Some of them are acts of transfiguration, divine transformation of photographer into art.

And her subjects are varied to say the least, though she focused on people and architecture of NY, LA, and Chicago. She captured people of all strata.

And she was very prolific! Having produced something like 150,000 photos or something in her lifetime.

She went unknown and unpublished during her lifetime and some of her film wasn't ever even developed!

She worked primarily as a nanny and took photographs as a hobby. The families she worked for said she was very private and usually spent her free time wandering around taking photos. And she never showed anyone the photos!

She fabricated names, histories, voices, etc when interacting with people outside of her families. ]

The kids she nannied "She was a Socialist, a Feminist, a movie critic, and a tell-it-like-it-is type of person" (source: John Maloof, curator of Maier's work)

She also kept audio recordings she made with the subjects of many of her photos!

I discovered her through Finding Vivian Maier (2013) which I highly recommend you track down.

If it's possible to be in love with someone you've never met, separated by generations, then I love Vivian Maier. Madly.

I wish I could tell her how much her work means to me.

[eucanthos]

Vivian Maier   (US, 1926 - 2009)

Self-Portrait, 1955

Short bio of wonder [edited]

American of French and Austro-Hungarian extraction, intensely guarded and private, decidedly unmaterialistic (money-wise), Vivian would amass found items, art books, newspaper clippings, home films and thankfully her negatives. She recorded the 2nd 1\2 of the 20th c. Urban America, creating masterpieces of Street Photography.

Maier would leave behind over 100,000 negatives and a series of homemade documentary films and audio recordings.

Having picked up photography in Europe 2 years earlier, came back to New York City in 1951, where she would comb the streets. In 1956 Vivian left for Chicago, where she’d spend most of the rest of her life working as a Nanny and “quietly” taking pictures.

Her first camera was a modest Kodak Brownie (one shutter speed, no aperture and focus control) soon to be replaced in 1952 by her first (of many) Rolleiflex. She later also used a Leica IIIc, an Ihagee Exakta, a Zeiss Contarex and various other SLR cameras.

Maier’s massive body of work would come to light when in 2007 at a local thrift auction house on Chicago’s Northwest Side. John Maloof discovered, championed and archived her work. Now, with roughly 90% of her work reconstructed and cataloged, it's available to the public.

https://www.vivianmaier.com/gallery/self-portraits/#slide-13

https://www.vivianmaier.com/about-vivian-maier/

[libraryofjoy]

Books read in September of 2023

Nights of Plague by Orhan Pamuk. Fiction: historical. A fictional island in the Ottoman Empire inhabited by a Muslim and Greek Orthodox population is left to fend for itself after a plague becomes uncontrollable. This book was long and intricate. Despite the historical setting, the dysfunctional government and religious conflict exacerbating the damage of a plague felt a little too close ot home.

The Confessions of St Augustine. Nonfiction: autobiographical, religious. Augustine's life story and theology. A lot more about time than I would've expected. Sometimes I think he's overdramatic or unhelpful, but then sometimes I'm amazed at his devotion and love for God. Augustine is early enough and influential enough that he's probably going to be vaguely relevant to my studies at some point, so it made sense to read the Confessions.

When We Were Sisters by Fatimah Asghar. Fiction: contemporary, maybe a bit of poetry? This book tells the story of three orphaned sisters who have to make a life for themselves, under the neglect and abuse of their guardian uncle, negotiating issues like the immigration status of their family members, gender and sexuality, and living as Muslims when their access to Muslim community is restricted.

The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa. Fiction: speculative, dystopian. On an island where things keep disappearing, people who don't forget the disappearing items face persecution from their government. As life gets bleaker and more mundane, the characters of this book resist in small, subtle bursts of color and joy.

Where Reason Ends by Yiyun Li. Fiction: autobiographical, contemporary. A mother has a conversation with her dead teenage son after he commits suicide.

The Age of Wood by Roland Ennos. Nonfiction: history, nature. This book traces how wood has been used throughout history. This book paired well with Teaching the Trees by Joan Maloof, which I read earlier this year.

The Blue Castle by Lucy Maud Montgomery. Fiction: romance. When a 29-year-old woman is told that she only has a year to live, she decides to defy her relatives' expectations and live on her own terms. I found Valancy so deeply relatable that it was a delight to see her crafting the life she wanted. The plot twists in this book are ah... big and melodramatic. I don't think this is LMM's tightest work from a craft perspective, but it was a really enjoyable book and I'd recommend it to my fellow lonely spinsters (with the caveat that it is a romance :/ )

Kibogo by Scholastique Mukasonga. Fiction: historical, contemporary, postcolonial. This book follows a Rwandan village through several generations of religious developments in response to Christian missionaries. This book is critical of missionary colonization in ways that are similar to Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe or The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. I thought the various ways in which characters made sense of Christianity in light of their largely banned yet profoundly present preexisting belief stories was really remarkable.

Oranges by John McPhee. Nonfiction: agriculture, travel. There was a lot of fascinating information about how oranges get to consumers, albeit probably a few decades out of date.

No god but God by Reza Aslan. Nonfiction: history, religion. This book traces the origins and history of Islam. It was published in 2009 and does make some conscious effort to be an apologetic for Islam to a hostile post-911 society. This is one of the books I'm reading to make up for the Islam in America class I had to drop from this semester.

The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri. Fiction: contemporary. When their newborn son's prospective name is lost in the mail, a Desi couple living in New England resort to naming him after Russian author Nikolai Gogol, a decision that shapes the trajectory of their son's life.

When I Was a Child I Read Books by Marilynne Robinson. Nonfiction: religion, sociology, economics. This is a collection of essays. I really appreciate the way Marilynne Robinson writes about the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible. I highly recommend this book for Christians who would like to avoid inadvertent antisemitism.

Bee Season by Myla Goldberg. Fiction: contemporary, speculative? This book follows a loving but dysfunctional family of four, each of whom wrestles with religious identity and purpose. There are spelling bees, kaleidoscopes, Jewish mysticism, and the inescapable strain of parent-child relationships caused by individual exploration of faith.

I'm happy to give content warnings for any of these! I really tried to push myself this month, and I feel like it paid off. I managed to get a few books off the really dusty and abandoned depths of my TBR list.

Fiction: 8

Nonfiction: 5

Total books this month: 13

Total fiction this year: 30

Total nonfiction this year: 36

[stricklandvintagewatches]

If you love fine photography as much as we do, you must treat yourself to the documentary, “Finding Vivian Maier.” Written and directed by John Maloof, the young man who discovered her work, it is an attempt to find out about the reclusive Chicago nanny whose images are considered by many to be the finest street photography of the 20th century. Her images – all 200,000 of them – were discovered as negatives and undeveloped rolls of film at an abandoned storage locker sale. The documentary is a fine work in its own right. The above undated image of a Chicago street urchin with watch, along with other examples of Ms. Maier’s art and the documentary, “Finding Vivian Maier,“ can be found here:  http://www.vivianmaier.com/  http://goo.gl/tdwKlz

[nacentart]

Vivian Maier Photographer Streets Ahead

Vivian Maier was a remarkable American street photographer whose 150,000 negatives that she took over a 50 year period were stored away and left unseen until after Maier’s death in 2009, at the age of 83. With the timely emergence of internet picture sites, Maier’s street photography was discovered, thanks to Chicago-based picture collectors such as John Maloof and Ron Slattery. Since then, Maier’s work has become the subject of worldwide interest with books, documentaries, and exhibitions being made about her life, in particular, the excellent 2014 documentary Finding Vivian Maier, which was also nominated for best documentary at the Oscars. Maier spent her youth between the United States and France before moving back to New York in 1951, primarily working as a nanny for most of her life. It is hard to know where to start with Maier’s work, it is so varied but ultimately would be an understatement to say Maier’s photographs do not feel like someone's old attic box brownie family photographs, although Maier did start her photography with a single shutter Brownie. Maier turns the everyday life that surrounded her in cities such as Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York into individual vignettes of films never made. Her best-known work represents the streets of New York and Chicago in the 1950s and 60s.

Maier often took self-portraits or photographs of her own shadow. In many of her self-portraits, Maier is reflected in the glass of a window or a blown-up shadow on a distant wall. I think Maier occasionally wants to be part of her own record but there is an unsureness that I can relate to; she is there but not there. Occasionally she is bold, and her reflection is captured in a window, sometimes revealed like a spectral presence, other times she is starkly represented in the reflection of a mirror that someone is carrying in the street. I love Maier’s self-portrait mirror shots; I feel I become her in that moment. I am transitorily there at the point where the shutter fleetingly opens to capture the light. One can see the scene Maier wants to capture and the capturer.  Maier had such a great eye for trapping split-second dramas, be it a nun getting wheeled out on a stretcher, a man’s feet emerging and poking underneath a shop window blind, surrounded by food tins, or a film premiere with Kirk Douglas. Maier would walk around on her days off from nannying, traversing the windy streets from the upmarket to the poor areas of town. Nothing was off-subject, and it is a remarkable body of work.

Great care has also been taken in printing Maier’s negatives. A lot of images including the images from the official website were not originally printed by Maier and much debate about how a photographer wants to portray in physical form their negatives was studied in Maier’s case. According to the official website for Maier, Maier’s own printed photographs were examined, and notes were given to labs on how to crop and print etc, were used. One thing is sure, I am grateful that this valuable and significant archive of twentieth-century life was saved, but it does not just represent twentieth-century life. It is far from just a documentation of how we used to live. There is great artistry in Maier’s ability to find deeply humane moments in people's lives and somehow also turn each moment into the most important scene of the play or film.  

Photographs of some of the poor areas and people are very powerful and Maier does not look away from their obvious suffering. It also shows Maier’s own humanity in documenting their struggles, I think that comes across in her work. She had a real kinship with those who were destitute. Maier was a socialist and feminist and, ironically, Maier would also find herself struggling in the last decades of her life and, at some point, did become homeless. Fortunately, some of Maier’s former children, whom she looked after, came together to help her find a small apartment to live in. Maier’s negatives were eventually sold off to pay off debts in 2007, two years before she died, and eventually were sold to collectors such as John Maloof who have taken great care in helping to get Maier’s work in the public domain. Maier was a very guarded and private person in her life. We do not know how she would view her newfound fame, but I for one am happy that I have had the opportunity to see some of Vivian Maier’s astounding work.

[photobookjunkies]

From our personal shelf: Vivian Maier Street Photographer - edited by John Maloof and published by Schirmer/Mosel, 2011.

Visit our bookstore HERE 📚👀

[vintage-every-day]

Vivian Maier

[w-armansky-blog]

Introverts have fun too, we just don’t care if you know. Or when with the click of the shutter magic comes.

Vivian Maier (February 1, 1926 – April 21, 2009)

From the first sight, an ordinary American woman who’d been working for about 40 years as a nanny in New York and Chicago.

Leading an extremely private life Vivian Maier simultaneously created around 150,000 photographs. During her lifetime, Maier's photographs were unknown and unpublished. Her archive had been discovered only in 2007 as a a young former estate agent from Chicago, John Maloof, bought a box packed with about 30,000 negatives of Maier. In October 2009, Maloof linked his blog to a selection of Maier's photographs on the image-sharing website Flickr, and the results went viral, with thousands of people expressing interest. Since then, Maier's photographs have been exhibited around the world.

Born in New York in 1926 to European immigrant parents, Maier was by all accounts an instinctive outsider, insular and guarded, but utterly driven in her vocation. As a photographer, she was removed from, but constantly alert to, the countless small human dramas of the modernist city.

The woman took pictures of American life in the 1950s. Maier’s work comprises street scenes, snatched portraits and mischievous self-portraits as well as formal architectural studies, urban still lifes and angular closeups of arms, torsos, skin and fabric – but also her eye for moments of quiet intimacy or dreaminess. Mostly, she photographed children as she did adults: as themselves, without artifice or sentimentality. Untidy streets and sidewalks, tenement blocks and urban wastegrounds, where they pose, play and stare suspiciously, or stoically, at the strange, strait-laced lady with the camera.

Her camera, a Rolleiflex, was operated at chest level, which allowed the photographer to maintain eye contact with the person whose picture she was taking. Many of her strongest and most memorable shots are of people staring straight at her.

Maier preferred to shoot, and made work, in black-and-white. Black-and-white was a faster film to work with, as opposed to early Kodachrome, which was extremely slow and therefore riskier. With black-and-white, she could have prints to hold in her hand and reflect upon, which would put her more in harmony with her instincts. Her heart for the game of sight, the strength and purity of her instinct, and her deep love of photography show up more consistently in black-and-white. It was in this medium that she learned to stand her ground, to move in close to cops and drunks, punks and wise guys, and the old and infirm, yet stay connected and maintain her sense of humor in difficult situations.

Perhaps the most dramatic creative leap on her artistic path occurs when Maier starts shooting in colour and moves from a twin-lensed Rolleiflex camera, held at waist-height, to the freedom of a 35mm Leica with a viewfinder. The telling details she was drawn to throughout her career suddenly become more playful and textural. As she starts using colour film in the late 1950s, her approach becomes looser, more mischievous, as if she were entranced by the rich hues and deep, painterly tones as much as the subject matter.

Simple image of a hand holding a pinkie, folded on a red dress in a strangely affecting gesture behind a woman’s back.

Even those who thought they knew her were utterly astonished by the boldness of her secret creative life.

More striking perhaps, in terms of our contemporary fame-fixated culture, was her utter lack of interest in exhibiting her work, much less in embracing the attention that might have come with that kind of exposure. The making of it seems to have been fulfilment enough and no doubt brought its own solitary kind of freedom.

Vivian Maier chose to conceal herself and her art during her lifetime. Her indifference to any form of recognition or acknowledgment cannot help but being adored. The woman must have possessed a supreme kind of self-belief. Taking into the account Vivian Maier’s rich and varied body of work one can suppose she never doubted her own artistic worth. She just did it her way.

Maier is today considered a genius, a mysterious woman apart and resolutely ahead of her time.

source:https://www.theguardian.com/, Colin Westerbeck: Vivian Maier: The Color Work, 2018, http://vivianmaierproject.com/

[sunnyardn631]

Vivian Maier's documentary

Vivian Maier’s documentary was both interesting and shocking to me. Her mysterious story and experience in life really shapes her differently from any other photographer. I found her complicated identity relatively interesting as she is often described as “eccentric”, but I actually see her as unique. I think her decision of how she wanted to live her life as a nanny rather than a photographer is interesting as she had been living as a part of the “poor” for most of her life, when she could’ve lived an entirely different life if she pursued her interest as her career. She is a non materialistic person who seeks inner fulfillments through photography. 

Although her photographic practice may not always be ethical, with her documentary approach, many of the photos captured naturally provoke the subject’s emotion at the time or their reaction to a camera in front of them. Her decisions on subjects and imagery are unique as she doesn’t aim for the norms, but rather chase after the “bizarreness of life”. This was suggested to be influenced by her early life as she was seen to have “instant alertness to human tragedy” through her reaction to men and her collection of newspapers. Her photographs were mostly captured from a low angle shot as she took them with her Rolleiflex. Due to the influence of her job, her photography is mostly taken outdoors in a natural light setting when she takes the children out, or indoors in front of a mirror where she took her self portraits. She captures the innocence and curiosity of the children and the busy and mundane life of the city from adults. She mostly places the subject around the centre of the frame and makes a strong focus on the eye to highlight the sense of emotion through their expression. Besides, the photos were taken in black and white which creates a stronger emphasis on the expression.

The idea of how her life has never been told from her own perspective to the audience remains her true identity as ambiguous. Overall, I found it shocking how this documentary was filled with bits and pieces told from the perspective of people that she encountered in life and it is summarised by John Maloof, a person that can be considered as completely unrelated.

[ardn631madiwolfgramm]

Finding Vivian Maier

The women remained a mystery.

John Maloof collaborates with producer Charlie Siskel on Finding Vivian Maier to solve this mystery. They trace VivanMaier's history through New York City, France, and Chicago, following clues. Maier was a traveller and self-taught photographer who prefered a Rolleiflex twin-lens reflex camera and had an amazing ability to get up close and personal with people from all walks of life. Her artistic and comedic eye is similar to a lot of Berenice Abbott and Weegee. Critics and galleries have embraced Maier's work as a result of Maloof's efforts, and The New York Times named her "one of America's more insightful street photographers."

Took over 100,000 photographs that were discovered decades later in storage lockers and is now regarded as one of the twentieth century's greatest photographers. Maier's strange and riveting life and art are revealed through never-before-seen photographs, films, and interviews with dozens of people who thought they knew her.

However, as John Maloof meets people who knew Vivian, new questions about her life and work arise. Families who hired her as a nanny have mixed feelings about her and hint at her dark side. Would she have wanted this kind of attention? The answer depends on how you interpret various pieces of evidence. Regardless, seeing the world through Vivan Maier's eyes is a wonder.

As bizarre as her story is, her street photography was gaining her the fame and attention she had never desired. It had an impact all over the world, and it changed the life of John Maloof, the man who championed her work and brought it to the public's attention. Never-before-seen photographs, films, and interviews with dozens of people who thought they knew her reveal a strange and riveting life and art.

[lucysautblog]

Vivian Maier, 1926 - 2009.

Maier was a street photographer now well known for the 'mirror selfie' along with portraits of her family and strangers in particular the poor and elderly. The mirror selfie is presently dominating social media so seeing these photos of Maier taking a mirror selfie in the 1900s with a big older camera rather than the current iPhone is quite ahead of her time. Photos of hers I have selected above are all in black and white which creates an eerie mood, exaggerating shadows and bright light.

I think her photos execute her time well, showing what she was wearing, her haircut and her surroundings reflected being a woman in the 60s. Her expression in her self-portraits is mostly quite serious almost too drained from any energy to show emotion, I think this also adds to the monotone as it reflects the mood portrayed.

VIvian's work surprisingly only became known after she died in 2009. It is estimated she had over 100,000 negatives. Her work was auctioned off due to a nonpayment of rent in 2007, John Maloof was one of the men who discovered her work. "Now, with roughly 90% of her archive reconstructed, Vivian’s work is part of a renaissance in interest in the art of Street Photography." ( 2024, Maloof Collection Ltd.)

I think it's incredible that her work is so highly thought of and appreciated in the photography community yet in the duration of her life she did not show the public nor consider photography to be more than a hobby.

[interpretedimagejessicarayment]

Finding Vivian Maier - Documentary

John Maloof was a young flea market expert. He attended an auction where is was the lucky winner of a box of films (negatives). He didn't use them straight away as it wasn't what he was looking for at the time. As time passed he started to look through the box and found Vivian Maier's collection of film negatives. She was known to have many boxes filled with stuff in her room, so much so that you had very little space to walk. She had travelled to many places capturing different people around the world. Many families she worked with, knew her as a tall lady who would wear men's shirts and army-like boots. Vivian Maier was born in New York but grew up in France before coming back to New York where she was, a nanny, housekeeper, and caretaker.

www.vivianmaier.com

Many of her photos of self-portraits or street photography and portraits of others. Her work was known as "playful, authentic New York, quality and hopefully, it had a human understanding" - Joey Meyerowitz. Mary Ellen Clark said she has a "sense of humour but also a sense of tragedy". I found her work to be very detailed in such a way that it looked almost taken off guard. She took photos of everything which has made her work so vast and captivating. I love how she took photos of everything no matter how the emotion behind the photo felt. She would send her rolls of film to a small photo lab in France to get her films developed then sent back to her in America. I found this interesting as to why didn't she get her photos developed in America was the semi-gloss finish so important that she only trusted Simon. I think that her photos brought a new sense of belonging to people as she captured everyone. So she never really had an exact style of specific practice. One thing I noticed in her self-portraits is that she never smiled, she always had a straight face. I think she kept her work to herself as she was a private person and didn't like people going through her stuff, this reminds me of how she wouldn't let the families she worked for into her bedroom.