VIVIAN MAIER'S COLOR PHOTOS - ARTIST SPOTLIGHT
© 2018 SuZan Alexander, Vintage Camera Flash. Digital Photography
I have written a couple of posts about Vivian Maier. However, for those of you new to Ms. Maier’s name, she was a street photographer shrouded in mystery because her work went unseen until boxes of negatives, prints, and unprocessed film was acquired by chance. There is a documentary, “Finding Vivian Maier”, which was nominated for an Academy Award, that explores a little more about the photographer if you are so inclined to explore her story further. But, I feel like she is a mystery, and perhaps, that is the way she wanted it. We will never know for sure what her thoughts or wishes might have been, but that has not deterred the surge of interest in her work.
Her work spanned the decades from the 1950’s until a few years prior to her death in 2009. So, of course, the first images we have come to know as Vivian Maier’s are shot with the ubiquitous black-and-white film we generally associate with the 1950’s era. However, Ms. Maier captured images using color film as well. Some of her color images have been curated into a new book, “Vivian Maier: The Color Work”. There is also a corresponding exhibition of the color work at the Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York, New York which will be up through March 2, 2019.
While I have not yet seen the book, nor the exhibit of her work, I have seen a few images from this series on the Internet. I have to say, the black-and-white images were compositionally sound slices of life, but the color images… oh, my! You could not have planed some of those color palettes, so the fact that she caught them by happenstance is mind boggling. I hope you will take a look. Do an Internet search, look at some of the “sample” images from the series, and read some of the commentary if you have a few minutes.
If you do take a look, come back here and leave a comment letting me know which image was your favorite. I’d love to know.
