...more Vivian Maier!!!

This woman was incredible. I've never seen such fantastic street photography. She took thousands of rolls of film. Most unprinted and undeveloped, but nearly all photographic gems.

More pics here!

Thanks for these Smeggy. Nothing evokes a sense of time and place like her pictures do.

She's every bit as good as Dorothea Lange, in my opinion, but hardly anyone has heard of her. What strikes me is the way she not only sees a picture but manages the technical aspects perfectly (imagine what equipment she must have been using} and then composes the shot so memorably.

The most interesting fact and one which I find most moving, is that so many of her rolls of film remain undeveloped and unprinted. For her it must have been the act of taking the picture which was most important. I wonder whether, as we all have, she ever went out and took pictures without a roll of film loaded and, when she returned home, whether it really mattered to her? She's seen the pictures and framed and taken them. Anything else was, perhaps, incidental. I don't know.

And imagine being the guy in the darkroom today, developing and printing them for the first time...like Howard Carter in Egypt, except of course, better, because NO ONE has seen the images, not even the photographer.

I've had a go at street photography and it's easy to do...except that every shot has, so far, been rubbish!

As you say: she's incredible.

Those and the others on the linked site are shockingly good. I find it a bit unsettling that somebody with that talent stayed obscure and penniless.

All one can say is "Wow"

Some years ago, there was a lady from one of the Scottish universities who had built a reputation as a Social Psychologist on he analysis of a set of street shots by Bill Brandt. I heard her presentation at an internal University of Wales conference in early 1988, and heard her say that that no other photographer was remotely in the same league as BB. So, of course, I said "What about Ansel Adams?". She huffed and changed the subject. I have never heard of Vivian Maier until today, so thank you Smeggy.

But here is one thought ...
How much do the reputations of the really great photographers rest on the fact that they used monochrome? There is no distraction from (say) a single spot of bright colour - just the interplay of light and dark. I have stood in roughly the same place as Ansel Adams, and taken a landscape shot, and later tried to get the same effect as he did by turning it monochrome in Photoshop, and failed miserably.

So now, if all the old time greats were still here, and all using (say) K5s, what would their work look like? And what would it be like?

Geoff

I definitely find mono much more effective for architecture. Once you take the colour away the details jump at you, which is what I'm after. Most older buildings are covered in little bits and pieces which the majority of people completely ignore, despite the fact that those details would have taken considerable time and effort to add. It also seems to render images timeless - you could have stood at exactly the same spot any time in the past hundred years and taken that image, aside from clothing and minor details like TV aerials.

There's some colour shots on the Vivian Maier site. Equally as good as her B&W stuff IMO.

Yes every bit as good. I love the shot where the guy's head is cropped off, but at the bottom of the shot he's holding a National Geographic with a head shot on the cover. http://www.vivianmaier.com/media/gallery/color/may-1979.jpg

There is an exhibition of Maier's work on in London at the moment at the back of King's Cross in the German Gymnasium. It is part of the London Street Photography festival. There are three other exhibitions within a short walk including one in St Pancras and one in the British Library.

K.