Photographer: Vivian Maier
Vivian Maier is a US photographer who worked as a nanny for 40 years and pursued photography in her spare time. In her lifetime she was unknown and unpublished. Here prints, prints and films were auctioned off shortly before her death and a large amount of them were purchased by John Maloof who now owns 90% of her work. Unable to locate the photographer before her death Maloof set about exploring her work the quickly became an international sensation. Artist and photography critic has compared her work to that of Robert Frank, Diane Arbus and Helen Levitt.
Baudelaire’s Idea and Virginia Woolf’s Creative Method
Charles Baudelaire first put forward the idea of a flâneur, someone who silently wandered the city, observing, but this term has been redefined in our modern era to take on a more artist sense. Virginia Woolf discovered this method of walking around lead her to great creativity, she had the idea for “To the Lighthouse” one afternoon while walking in Tavistock Square. In a letter to Ethel Smyth in 1930, she wrote: “I cannot get my sense of unity and coherency and all that makes me wish to write the Lighthouse etc. unless I am perpetually stimulated.” This comes from engaging with the world, from “plung[ing] into London, between tea and dinner, and walk[ing] and walk[ing], reviving my fires, in the city, in some wretched slum, where I peep in at the doors of public houses.” ( A tribute to female flâneurs: the women who reclaimed our city streets, The Guardian)
Street Photography and the Modern Day Flâneur
In modern times, we might call a flâneur a loner or an artist and the methods of many street photographers resemble those of a flâneur. Vivian Maier is a good example of such a photographer. She was a very private person who took more than 100,000 pictures in her lifetime, it is clear very few ever saw them while she was alive. Born in New York in 1926 she then travelled to live with her mother in the French Alps but in 1951 see returned to Chicago where she took a job as a nanny. She roamed the city with a Rolleiflex camera photographic whatever stuck her interest people, situations, scapes, and events all were recorded in her camera. Her archive was bought as a chance purchase at an auction and through the efforts of the new owner, her images have become recognized as among the best street photography of the 20th century.
