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    Vivian Maier: A Photographer’s Life and Afterlife
    Unavailable
    Vivian Maier: A Photographer’s Life and Afterlife
    Unavailable
    Vivian Maier: A Photographer’s Life and Afterlife
    Ebook523 pages7 hours

    Vivian Maier: A Photographer’s Life and Afterlife

    By Pamela Bannos

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Who was Vivian Maier? Many people know her as the reclusive Chicago nanny who wandered the city for decades, constantly snapping photographs, which were unseen until they were discovered in a seemingly abandoned storage locker. They revealed her to be an inadvertent master of twentieth-century American street photography. Not long after, the news broke that Maier had recently died and had no surviving relatives. Soon the whole world knew about her preternatural work, shooting her to stardom almost overnight.
     
    But, as Pamela Bannos reveals in this meticulous and passionate biography, this story of the nanny savant has blinded us to Maier’s true achievements, as well as her intentions. Most important, Bannos argues, Maier was not a nanny who moonlighted as a photographer; she was a photographer who supported herself as a nanny. In Vivian Maier: A Photographer’s Life and Afterlife, Bannos contrasts Maier’s life with the mythology that strangers—mostly the men who have profited from her work—have created around her absence. Bannos shows that Maier was extremely conscientious about how her work was developed, printed, and cropped, even though she also made a clear choice never to display it. She places Maier’s fierce passion for privacy alongside the recent spread of her work around the world, and she explains Maier’s careful adjustments of photographic technique, while explaining how the photographs have been misconstrued or misidentified. As well, Bannos uncovers new information about Maier’s immediate family, including her difficult brother, Karl—relatives that once had been thought not to exist.
     
    This authoritative and engrossing biography shows that the real story of Vivian Maier, a true visionary artist, is even more compelling than the myth.
     
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
    Release dateOct 5, 2017
    ISBN9780226470894
    Unavailable
    Vivian Maier: A Photographer’s Life and Afterlife

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    Reviews for Vivian Maier

    4/5

    9 ratings2 reviews

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    • 4/5
      This biography is notable for the author's investigation into Maier's family background and upbringing in France. There's a lot of information on the discovery of her vast stash of undeveloped film and of the men who bought them from a storage locker - while she was still alive. But no one alive can explain her motives, her determination, her choices of subjects, her life's work. Some mysteries must remain hidden.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      A nanny by trade, photographer Vivian Maier was also an "street" artist who left behind thousands of developed and undeveloped pictures in storage lockers when she died in 2009. She became something of an eBay sensation when collectors started auctioning off her works, which attracted the admiring attention of the photographic community. Art scholar Pamela Bannos has produced as complete a biography of the artist as we are likely to have, given the paucity of documentation about her life. While this work may be valuable on a scholarly level, I didn't find it an enjoyable read. Admittedly, there is little we can know about Maier, but the text seems overly padded. The narrative is particularly heavy on descriptions of her travels and photographs (most of which are not included in the book). Even blog comment threads are recounted. There is also a lot of detail about the buying and selling of Maier's works through eBay auctions and websites. Maier doesn't emerge as much of a character in her own story, and her motivations and photographic obsessions (men sleeping outdoors, women in fancy hats) remain mysterious. This book is not for the casual reader.