Discovering Vivian Maier

In class we watched a documentary over the discovery of portrait and lifestyle photographer Vivian Maier. Vivian Maier was a very talented, private artist, so much so that no one even saw any of her work until after she passed. Someone had discovered her work at an auction show and decided to go out on a limb and buy her negatives. He has never seen her work and when he tried to look up her name on google nothing appeared. He got her negatives developed and then went out on a mission to find out exactly who this talented woman was and his goal was to make her famous even after her death and get her in the history books. I thought it was so interesting how private Maier was. She had no family and she worked as a nanny so those are the only connections he had when trying to find out who she was. Most of the people he talked to admitted that she was a very private person, had never seen any of her work and probably was turning over in her grave about all the attention her work was getting and the amount of people that now knew about her and her photos. I loved her work and loved how candid and free her style was. She was a street photographer so there was a sense of secrecy, mystery, and even playfulness about her work because the majority of her subjects didn't know that they were being photographed.