Vivian Maier - photography for the sake of photography
I do not know if you know who Vivian Maier is. Well my first blog post on this new website is dedicated to her. For those who do not know her, Vivian was an American street photographer born in New York City. Although born in the U.S., it was in France that Maier spent most of her youth. Maier returned to the U.S. in 1951 where she took up work as a nanny and care-giver for the rest of her life. In her leisure however, Maier had begun to venture into the art of photography. Consistently taking photos over the course of five decades, she would ultimately leave over 100,000 negatives, most of them shot in Chicago and New York City. Vivian would further indulge in her passionate devotion to documenting the world around her through homemade films, recordings and collections, assembling one of the most fascinating windows into American life in the second half of the twentieth century.
The amazing thing about Vivian is that while she really loved street photography and shooting, she did not publish any of the images. Infact her work was found by causality when the photographs in storage became lost memories until they were sold off due to non-payment of rent in 2007. The negatives were auctioned off by the storage company to RPN Sales, who parted out the boxes in a much larger auction to several buyers including John Maloof. To cut a long story short, John was looking for images of a project but the negatives acquired where not relevant. However he got interested in photography and after posting some of the negatives he decided to acquire all the negatives available of Vivian Maier.
You may want to more read more of here story and see more of her work… in such case I would direct you http://www.vivianmaier.com/about-vivian-maier/ . A film documentary has been created of this fascinating story….
Why do I mention Vivian to you? Well I feel I have this same passion in myself as Vivian had. I just love to shoot Street Photography just for the sake of documenting the life and moments of people and sharpening my capability of observation. The question we photographers have to ask is do we just do photography just for the love of photography? Not because you need to or are asked to or are commissioned to - but just for the fun of it. This is what I intend to do more freely in this website and blog. I can here express my sentiments with you - both visually and through words.
I therefore start by sharing some images which I was able to take during this last month in Hamrun... casually and just for fun… with no real purpose. Let us get back to enjoy the small daily things in life! I hope that some day, someone may find these images interesting and intriguing! All the images were shot with the RX1Rii camera.
