Someone that inspires me is a woman named Vivian Maier. Maier’s recent, sudden ascent from reclusive eccentric to esteemed photographer is one of the more remarkable stories in American photography. Maier had been born in New York City in 1926, to a French mother and Austrian father; she had spent part of her youth in France, but she worked as a nanny in the United States for half a century, winding down her career in the 1990s. Though some of the children she helped raise supported Maier after they came of age, she couldn’t make the payments on a storage locker she rented.
In 2007, the locker’s contents ended up at a Chicago auction house, where a young real estate agent named John Maloof came upon her negatives. Maloof, an amateur historian, spotted a few shots of Chicago he liked. He bought a box of 30,000 negatives for $400. Maloof soon realized what he had discovered and started a blog about her photographs.
What inspires me most is the idea of a woman who as a street photographer was completely in self-imposed exile from the photography world. Yet she made thousands and thousands of photographs obsessively, and created a very interesting body of work.”
In late 2008, she slipped on a patch of ice, sustaining a head injury that spiraled into other health problems. She died April 20, 2009, age 83. You can read more about her by clicking the link below.
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