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Vivian Maier: A life's work seen for first time
- bluishgreen 16y agofascinating! thanks for posting.
- rythie 16y agoKickstarter project: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/800508197/finding-vivian-maier-a-feature-length-documentary http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/800508197/finding-vivian...
- Jun8 16y agoJust pledged. Currently it's got $67K+ pledged for its $20K goal
- Jun8 16y agoVery poignant story! Her photos are exquisite. Her solitary and obscure life brought tears to my eyes on this cold Chicago morning. Yet, this story gets only 3 points (so far)? Guys, there are more things to heaven and earth than tech and financial stuff. I hope it makes to first page.
- rythie 16y agoThere is a analogy with failed startups, in that she created something of value, but was never was able to promote it (assuming she tried).
- edw519 16y agoMaier was untrained, but her images are artfully framed and detailed So much has been accomplished by those who were "untrained, but". I wonder if that says as much about the training as it does about the accomplishments.
- rythie 16y agoI don't think you can really train someone to be an artist or be creative anyway.
- alexophile 16y agoDisagreed. I think everyone has the potential for creativity, it just gets scared out of us as we grow up. Teaching someone to paint or take well-structured photographs is pretty much trivial as long as they put in the effort. And once you give somebody a tool to adequately express the way they see the world, most can barely help but be creative.
- neilk 16y agoIt depends what you mean by 'an artist'. Consider that every one of us is constantly expressing ourselves, in unique ways and with a unique personality, in language. There's no reason you can't train someone to have similar competency to express themselves in another medium. People who attend those 'drawing from life' courses invariably are much better by the end of it. I knew a guy who didn't have a lot of artistic flair, but he liked cars and machines. By the end of the course he was producing some really precise, great looking drawings of vehicles and engines. If you define 'an artist' as someone who's able to move the state of the art, create bold new visions -- well, not everyone may be capable of that. But I think that's an unnecessarily narrow conception of art.
- electromagnetic 16y ago> If you define 'an artist' as someone who's able to move the state of the art, create bold new visions -- well, not everyone may be capable of that. But I think that's an unnecessarily narrow conception of art. Agreed. I don't think you can 'train' someone to be a cultural revolutionary. Look at Stephen King, he spent virtually his entire life writing stories, the education he received only served to skip him past mistakes he would have run into and figured out by himself sooner or later. There are however countless thousands of people out there writing nothing more than pulp fiction, entertaining people and probably only making enough cash to help put their kids through college or to pay for a nice vacation next year. I used to play bass guitar, I used to write my own songs, I knew a few people who genuinely liked them. If I'd have put as much effort into my music as I have writing then I would probably genuinely be a musician right now, but I want to be an author because since I could talk I've been telling stories.
- alexophile 16y agoAn interesting addendum: John Maloof, who 'dicovered' her work, as it were, decided to try and locate her after some time. His search turned up her obituary. It had been posted the previous day.
- Tycho 16y agoWhat's the point of photographs like this though? (philosophical question)
- pavlov 16y agoWhat's the point of philosophy? (photographical question)
- Tycho 16y agoI just said 'philosphical question' so I wouldn't get downvoted for sounding cynical. Are you saying it is impossible to verbalize the 'point' of photography? Regardless, sometimes photographs capture remarkable events or spectacular scenes, in which cases the point could be easily understood as 'seeing things you would have liked to have seen but didn't get the chance' Now in this here collection, almost all the photos are just of strangers on the street. Something you can see everyday with your own eyes. So what is the point?
- mechanical_fish 16y agoThere are ten thousand answers to your question, but here's the most drab and pedantic of them: No, I absolutely cannot walk out onto the street and see a scene from the 1960s. There was a fun essay once where someone pointed out the value of photographing everyday objects. Tools, cars, clothes. These are the things that you'll most wish you'd photographed, because they are the most ephemeral. The Grand Canyon looks much as it did in Ansel Adams' day. People look only a bit different than they used to. But the objects are gone. The streets and the buildings are gone.
- reneherse 16y agoMovies that capture the essence of a time and place are great for this too. Just re-watched Hitchcock's Vertigo last night and wished I could have stepped back into the San Francisco of fifty years ago...
- thrdOriginal 16y ago
- NIL8 16y agoNeat story with many parallels to other areas of life (yes, even the hacker's life). Side note: I enjoy the comments, but some remind me of Reddit. I think there may be some inbreeding going on here. I say this in good humor.
- js2 16y agoI submitted this last week but it didn't get any traction: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2095598 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2095598 John Maloof, a 29-year-old eBay entrepreneur and real estate agent, is now principal cheerleader in the effort to find a niche for Ms. Maier at the pantheon of modern photography. He is only about one-tenth of the way into the task of scanning and archiving 100,000 negatives of hers in his possession, working with his friend Anthony Rydzon. And they have yet to develop several hundred rolls of black-and-white film and about 600 color rolls. http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/07/new-street-photography-60-years-old/ http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/07/new-street-photogra... The photos are truly extraordinary. Watch this terrific segment too - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWEDOnBfDUI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWEDOnBfDUI And for those of you fortunate enough to reside in Chicago - http://www.explorechicago.org/city/en/things_see_do/event_landing/events/dca_tourism/FindingVivianMaier_ChicagoStreetPhotographer.html http://www.explorechicago.org/city/en/things_see_do/event_la...
- neilk 16y agoIt's kind of an interesting question -- usually importance in the art world is a combination of excellence and influence. So even if you hate Andy Warhol, you have to admit the guy was influential, so he deserves his place in art history. Now we have a case of someone whose work was excellent, but for obvious reasons could not possibly have influenced anyone else. Where should she be in the history of art?
- aristus 16y agoThe same place as Van Gogh and Emily Dickinson. She had little influence while she was alive, but will gain more as time goes on. Posthumous fame is a cliche in the arts.
- neilk 16y agovan Gogh only got serious about painting in the last decade of his life, and even then he was pretty well known. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posthumous_fame_of_Vincent_van_Gogh http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posthumous_fame_of_Vincent_van_... Toulouse-Lautrec even challenged another artist to a duel over the worth of van Gogh's paintings. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincent_van_Gogh_chronology#1890 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincent_van_Gogh_chronology#189... I'm only an amateur aficionado of photography, but Vivian Maier seems a bit different. The quality is undeniable but the style seems a bit derivative or antique by 2010 standards. At least so far, I don't see territory that hasn't been well covered by other street photographers. Maybe more treasures will be unearthed from the collection, though. A thought just struck me: maybe she just couldn't afford, or never had time, to get her negs developed. What sort of photographer might she have become if she could have closed that loop just a bit faster, or easier?
- ja27 16y agoIn other discussions I've seen people raise the copyright issues. Her estate owns the rights to these works, not John Maloof. But I don't think anyone except her heirs or other beneficiaries would have standing to sue him. They're either non-existent (she had no known children) or not interested. I'm afraid that won't stop people from causing problems for him once there's money involved.
- InclinedPlane 16y agoI don't see how there could be much legal standing for that position. If Maloof bought the original negatives and especially if the Meier estate has not retained any copies of the work then he's got an enormously strong case to having bought not just a copy of the work but the work itself and the rights to distribute it.
- dctoedt 16y ago> If Maloof bought the original negatives and especially if the Meier estate has not retained any copies of the work then he's got an enormously strong case to having bought not just a copy of the work but the work itself and the rights to distribute it. Copyright law doesn't work that way. This argument is expressly addressed in 17 USC 202: "Ownership of a copyright, or of any of the exclusive rights under a copyright, is distinct from ownership of any material object in which the work is embodied. "Transfer of ownership of any material object, including the copy or phonorecord in which the work is first fixed, does not of itself convey any rights in the copyrighted work embodied in the object; nor, in the absence of an agreement, does transfer of ownership of a copyright or of any exclusive rights under a copyright convey property rights in any material object." (Extra paragraphing added.)
- InclinedPlane 16y agoSure, if I sell you a copy of my novel or of a photograph that doesn't necessarily mean, of itself, that I've transferred ownership of the copyright to that work. Even if I've sold you the original handwritten manuscript or the original photographic slide. Even in the absence of any explicit agreement on my part in regards to the disposition of the copyright. However, if I sell every known copy of the work to you while intentionally depriving myself of any copy and the ability to reproduce copies, then there is a very much stronger case that through that action I've transfered the rights to the work. As far as I know that seems to be the case here.
- joe_the_user 16y agoThe headline makes me think. The article admits that we know virtually nothing about Vivian Maier. There is nothing that implies her life was "lost" in her eyes, nothing to prove that she lived differently than she would have liked to have lived. her work was nearly lost to the glare of publicity but would have been our loss, not hers.
- msg 16y agoIt is ambiguous: "a lost (life's work)" is the intended interpretation. "rediscovered" is more like it. Of course you could talk about "a (rediscovered life)'s work" in an interesting way too...